I joined Ethos less than 24hrs ago, thanks to @0xkovv. Now, it's time to build a reputation.

Funny how I switch between Rabby and Zerion depending on what action I'm about to do. A simple transfer/Incoming tx- Zerion DeFi Activities- Rabby Feels comfortable for me that way.

There's a new narrative among projects. "TGE soon. We are launching this token. Here is our Tokenomics. No VC, No Insider, just the community, and so on." --- Why Is This Pitch Working? Projects learned a hard lesson in 2023 and 2024 when many early-stage tokens cratered the moment insider cliffs expired. @HyperliquidX flipped this. It shipped a working perp DEX first, skipped pre-sale allocations, and airdropped 28% of the supply straight to users. Within two months, the airdrop’s paper value topped $7B and daily volume hit $1.39B, forcing funds that sat out to buy on-market instead of at a discount. The case proved that a genuine product plus a fair launch can manufacture demand without venture backing. --- Are There Upsides To “Community-Only” Launches? Yes, they are: • Revenue Funds liquidity: Hyperliquid routes trading fees to a buy-back wallet, creating constant bid support. • Clear Utility: The token is used to scale demand with usage. • Transparent Ownership: No VC overhang that depresses early trading. When those three pieces click, the token becomes the cash flow pipe for the protocol. --- I See A Problem In The Narrative. Why? Too many teams copied the slogan without copying the substance. In the AI-agent boom, most agent tokens survived barely 17 days on average, and the failure mode is simple: • No sticky product → no external cash flows. • Token utility limited to “number go up” → demand collapses once hype fades. • Supply still inflates on schedule → price is on the way down --- Misaligned Economics Can Also Wreck Real Products What am I talking about? A functioning app is not enough if the distribution is skewed. Oversized team or advisor slices, infinity-inflation emissions, or no burn offset eliminate trust and squeeze long-term holders. 90% of tokens launched since 2020 now trade below listing price, and this is traced mainly to poor incentive design. This is why I have a number of things I consider before I trust any project selling the NO VC narrative. --- Checklist Before You Salute A “No-VC” Launch 1. Revenue Engine: Can the protocol earn fees in a market large enough to matter? 2. Token Sink: Do users need the token to access that revenue or service? 3. Supply Cadence: Is issuance matched to projected activity, with clear caps and transparent unlocks? 4. Post-launch Liquidity Plan: Fees, buy-backs, or sinks that recycle value into the float. 5. Adaptive governance: Mechanisms to tune parameters once the market reveals flaws. If any one of these boxes is empty, the absence of a VC is a warning that retail is being asked to provide exit liquidity. --- Finally, community-first launches can democratize ownership and even pressure funds to pay fair market prices, but only when backed by real product traction and disciplined token engineering. Copy-paste slogans will not fix a weak business model, and misaligned emission schedules can gut even strong projects. Treat every new “TGE soon” thread as a pitch deck, follow the cash flows, read the cap table, and remember that code without economics is not a market, but just software. Thanks for reading! If you learned something, kindly share and follow me @RubiksWeb3hub for more insights.

I know I'm not a Master Prompt Engineer, but I have to spend more time with Grok 4 to fit it into my methodology. I haven't gotten any satisfaction from using it yet as opposed to O3 but I'll sure find out. There's one thing I like though. The reasoning breakdown is cool

99 % of ‘crypto incubators’ are merely accelerators with a new logo. The 1 % that wire real economic loops become billion-dollar ecosystems. Here is how you can spot successful INCUBATORS and play the game right🧵👇

Next strategy Steal $40M and then collect $5M bounty.

AI Centralization vs Decentralization: What’s Worth Playing? Imagine two arenas: one is dominated by tech giants running massive data centers, training frontier models, and setting the rules. The other distributes compute, data, and decision-making across millions of miners, edge devices, and open communities. Where you choose to build or invest depends on which arena you believe will capture the next wave of value, or whether the true opportunity lies in bridging both. --- What Centralization and Decentralization Mean in AI Centralized AI is primarily found in hyperscale cloud platforms like AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud, which control the majority of GPU clusters and hold a 68% share of the global cloud market. These providers train large models, keep weights closed or under restrictive licenses (as seen with OpenAI and Anthropic), and use proprietary datasets and exclusive data partnerships. Governance is typically corporate, steered by boards, shareholders, and national regulators. On the other hand, Decentralized AI distributes computation through peer-to-peer GPU markets, such as @akashnet_ and @rendernetwork, as well as on-chain inference networks like @bittensor_. These networks aim to decentralize both training and inference. --- Why Centralization Still Dominates There are structural reasons why centralized AI continues to lead. Training a frontier model, say, a 2-trillion parameter multilingual model, requires over $500M in hardware, electricity, and human capital. Very few entities can fund and execute such undertakings. Additionally, regulatory obligations such as the US Executive Order on AI and the EU AI Act impose strict requirements around red-teaming, safety reports, and transparency. Meeting these demands creates a compliance moat that favors well-resourced incumbents. Centralization also allows for tighter safety monitoring and lifecycle management across training and deployment phases. --- Centralized Model Cracks Yet this dominance has vulnerabilities. There’s increasing concern over concentration risk. In Europe, executives from 44 major companies have warned regulators that the EU AI Act could unintentionally reinforce US cloud monopolies and constrain regional AI development. Export controls, particularly US-led GPU restrictions, limit who can access high-end compute, encouraging countries and developers to look toward decentralized or open alternatives. Additionally, API pricing for proprietary models has seen multiple increases since 2024. These monopoly rents are motivating developers to consider lower-cost, open-weight, or decentralized solutions. --- Decentralized AI We have on-chain compute markets such as Akash, Render, and @ionet that enable GPU owners to rent out unused capacity to AI workloads. These platforms are now expanding to support AMD GPUs and are working on workload-level proofs to guarantee performance. Bittensor incentivizes validators and model runners through $TAO token. Federated learning is gaining adoption, mostly in healthcare and finance, by enabling collaborative training without moving sensitive raw data. Proof-of-inference and zero-knowledge machine learning enable verifiable model outputs even when running on untrusted hardware. These are foundational steps for decentralized, trustless AI APIs. --- Where the Economic Opportunity Lies In the short term (today to 18 months), the focus is on application-layer infrastructure. Tools that allow enterprises to easily switch between OpenAI, Anthropic, Mistral, or local open-weight models will be valuable. Similarly, fine-tuned studios offering regulatory-compliant versions of open models under enterprise SLAs are gaining traction. In the medium term (18 months to 5 years), decentralized GPU networks would spiral in as their token prices reflect actual usage. Meanwhile, Bittensor-style subnetworks focused on specialized tasks, like risk scoring or protein folding, will scale efficiently through network effects. In the long term (5+ years), edge AI is likely to dominate. Phones, cars, and IoT devices will run local LLMs trained through federated learning, cutting latency and cloud dependence. Data-ownership protocols will also emerge, allowing users to earn micro-royalties as their devices contribute gradients to global model updates. --- How to Identify the Winners Projects likely to succeed will have a strong technical moat, solving problems around bandwidth, verification, or privacy in a way that delivers orders of magnitude improvements. Economic flywheels must be well-designed. Higher usage should fund better infrastructure and contributors, not just subsidize free riders. Governance is essential. Token voting alone is fragile, look instead for multi-stakeholder councils, progressive decentralization paths, or dual-class token models. Finally, ecosystem pull matters. Protocols that integrate early with developer toolchains will compound adoption faster. --- Strategic Plays For investors, it may be wise to hedge, holding exposure to both centralized APIs (for stable returns) and decentralized tokens (for asymmetric upside). For builders, abstraction layers that allow real-time switching between centralized and decentralized endpoints, based on latency, cost, or compliance, is a high-leverage opportunity. The most valuable opportunities may lie not at the poles but in the connective tissue: protocols, orchestration layers, and cryptographic proofs that allow workloads to route freely within both centralized and decentralized systems. Thanks for reading!

What does 100 post and quality replies daily get you?

I simply don't like prediction markets.

21M Bitcoins, When Mined, What Happens Next? As we all know, Bitcoin’s design caps the total supply at 21M coins. So, Again, After The Last Bitcoin Block, Can the System Still Hold? Read up, bros 👇 Bitcoin halves the new-coin subsidy roughly every four years. Once the final subsidy is paid, likely around the year 2140, the only revenue left for miners will be transaction fees. The concern is clear. If fees remain too low, miners may shut down their machines, reducing the hash rate and the cost required to attack the network. What can the system do about this? --- 1. Where Miner Income Stands Today Since the April 2024 halving, the block subsidy fell to 3.125 BTC. Fees briefly spiked during the Ordinals and Runes craze in early 2024 and covered more than the subsidy for a few days. Right now, fees are back to about 7% of miner revenue, the lowest share since the last bear market bottom. Energy alone for an average block still costs $90K at $0.05kw/h. So the fee component would have to rise 4X to keep the lights on at current prices. --- 2. The Runway To 2140 The subsidy does not disappear overnight. Even after the next halving in 2028, about 90% of miner revenue is still projected to come from new coins. The security budget therefore declines slowly, giving almost a century to find stable fee sources. That runway matters. It allows both protocol innovation and organic economic growth to close the gap. --- 3. Security Budget And Attack Cost The security budget is the total value miners earn per block. A fall in that budget is not automatically catastrophic because the difficulty adjustment reduces the hash rate until the marginal miner is again profitable. The risk is that the dollar cost to cause a majority attack could fall faster than the network’s economic throughput, inviting well-funded adversaries. --- 4. How A Sustainable Fee Market Could Emerge A. Fee pressure from finite block space: Even without new features, Bitcoin’s base layer can settle only a few hundred thousand transactions per day. If global demand for final settlement rises while block space stays scarce, users will bid up fees and miners will capture that scarcity premium. A functioning fee market already exists but remains thin because global demand is still modest. B. Event-driven surges signal latent demand: The Ordinals inscription boom showed that novel uses of the block space can push fee revenue above the subsidy, at least temporarily. Although the surge faded, it illustrated the willingness of users to pay when they perceive unique value in Bitcoin’s immutability. C. Layer two settlement: Lightning, Fedimint, ₿apps, rollups proposed with opcodes such as OP_CAT or BitVM, and drivechains are all designed to batch many off-chain transfers into a single on-chain settlement transaction. If these ecosystems grow, a rising fraction of global value could settle back to the base layer and pay higher aggregate fees, even while individual retail transfers remain cheap. D. High-value transaction categories still untapped: Large corporate treasuries, sovereign wealth funds, tokenized real assets, and advanced covenant-based applications could each inject blocks with transactions whose absolute fee in dollars is far higher than today’s median. Studies show that specialized activity clusters drive heavy tails in the fee distribution. --- 5. Protocol Level Responses → Incremental soft forks: Features that raise the economic density of each byte, such as covenants, enhanced scripting, or native rollup factors, can lift the upper bound on fee revenue without changing the supply schedule. → Tail emission proposals: Communities advocate adding a 0.1% annual inflation subsidy to guarantee a minimum security budget. This breaks the fixed supply credo and requires social consensus. → Reclaiming dormant coins: Others suggest recycling inactive coins, but that challenges the standing norms about property rights on-chain. --- 6. Miner Adaptation and Diversification Publicly listed miners such as @RiotPlatforms and @MARA began combining bitcoin production with data-center hosting, AI inference, and renewable energy balancing to cushion revenue volatility. This would subsidise continued hash power even during low-fee eras. It does not solve the security budget problem on its own, but it buys additional resilience. --- 7. Scenario Analysis → Optimistic path: Global adoption of Bitcoin as a neutral settlement rail, plus successful L2 ecosystems, drives persistent block space competition. Fees rise to several hundred thousand dollars per block, replacing the vanishing subsidy and keeping the hash rate high. → Stagnant store of value path: If on-chain demand plateaus and Bitcoin functions mainly as cold storage, fees stay low. The hash rate declines until only the cheapest renewable sites remain profitable. Security might still suffice for static savings but would be vulnerable to state-level attacks during periods of price weakness. --- Bottom line Bitcoin has roughly 115 years before the subsidy disappears entirely, but the incentives are already shifting. Either fees must rise through genuine economic demand for scarce settlement slots, or the rules must change, or security will adjust downward. Each outcome is possible. The coming decades will test these, but what will not work is a static model that ignores economics. Bitcoin stays secure only as long as someone is willing to pay for that security. Thanks for reading!