Written by: _gabrielShapir0
Compiled by: AididiaoJP, Foresight News
Thoughts on ETH
Lately, I've been seriously thinking about ETH—why do I hold it? Do I want to continue holding it? Why do I think it has value?
From friends and colleagues, I've heard three main perspectives on ETH:
- "Bitcoin +" — A store of value against monetary debasement, but "better" because:
- It can be deflationary when needed, inflationary when necessary
- It has native programmability, allowing use of this currency without relying on third parties
- "System Equity" — ETH is like the stock of a decentralized computing platform: the more people use it → the greater the demand for block space → the more fees + the more ETH is burned → the higher the scarcity
- "Digital Oil" — A commodity perspective somewhere between the first two
These views are not mutually exclusive, just different angles on the same thing.
My view is related to them, but slightly different: ETH is cyberpunk currency, and cyberpunk is the current environment.
Cyberpunk vs. Cypherpunk: Why This Distinction Matters Now
In works like "Neuromancer" and "Cyberpunk 2077," currency is less a moral concept and more of a "routing tool": chains of credit, corporate accounts, street cash, favors—value flows through channels not fully monitored by the system. Those who truly have a say are the ones who can get transactions done under pressure.
"Money" is everywhere, but the real key question is: Can you still transact when the corporate system is against you? Identity verification, access permissions, executing transactions, exiting markets—all ultimately boil down to one question: Can you still get your transaction confirmed, settled, and recognized as valid?
This is the correct angle from which to understand Ethereum.
ETH is not a "cypherpunk currency" in the narrow sense (like ZCash, which focuses on privacy). It is cyberpunk currency: a bearer instrument in a world that is both adversarial and interdependent.
There has always been a false dichotomy in the crypto space: either you're building liberating technology against institutions, or you're building enterprise infrastructure and "betraying the ideal." Reality is more complex and more interesting:
- Large companies will build and use crypto rails; they are already doing so
- Crypto off-ramps will bypass rigidity, exploitation, and censorship
Cypherpunk is a crypto-driven product: privacy, anonymity, secure communication, using mathematical tools to resist centralized control. It essentially completely excludes the "corporate side" because corporations are unwilling to transact in completely unregulated areas.
Cyberpunk is broader and more inclusive: system hacking at institutional boundaries—merging technology, law, finance, identity, social engineering, where style is strategy, and rules are written by a mix of code and contracts. Corporations can operate here because compliance, enforcement, and accountability are possible, but "outlaws" can too—this makes cyberpunk a universe where all participants can interact freely, couple, and subvert each other.
Ethereum's positioning is right here: building protocols that allow adversarial institutions to interoperate, while preserving true exit rights and property rights for anyone who can sign and pay. And using ETH as currency in that "future city" is cyberpunk.
ETH as Cyberpunk Currency
ETH's value proposition as "currency" is often simplified into the "digital gold" narrative, trying to convince Bitcoin holders and gold enthusiasts. But they are already fully convinced by BTC or gold and won't switch to ETH.
BTC and gold themselves don't "carry" anything—they are a memecoin, a hedge against a specific social philosophy of fiat inflation and the central banking system. Personally, I believe that in the new deflationary normal brought by AI and robotics, this hedge will become increasingly irrelevant.
The vision of ETH as cyberpunk currency is grander and more intuitively appealing because ETH always conveys exercisable "system rights" within the Ethereum network system. ETH is tightly bound to the smart contract environment, enabling "trustless" commerce, which gives it sustained value even in a deflationary environment because:
- It has real economic fundamentals supporting its value
- In an increasingly polarized, technocratic society, both corporations and individuals need an "economic autonomous zone"
ETH's Fundamentals
Under Proof-of-Stake, ETH doesn't just "represent" value; it is a resource used to purchase the ability to have your transactions executed, included in the blockchain, and to participate in consensus:
- With Ethereum's inclusion of FOCIL in the Hegota upgrade, paying validators the current market rate in ETH guarantees your transaction is included in a block and executed
- 32 ETH plus consumer-grade hardware activates a validator, allowing participation in proposing/proving blocks, and (roughly speaking) "voting" on whether to adopt certain protocol upgrades
These network powers of ETH within the protocol are its fundamentals. In practice, they are enforced by explicit state transition functions plus slashing mechanisms.
This is also why PoS supports cyberpunk currency better than PoW:
- ETH gives you protocol-native operational participation rights: staking is the barrier, stake can be slashed
- BTC is supported by belief-based scarcity plus durability; the mining barrier is specialized ASIC hardware, which has no intrinsic link to BTC ownership; transaction inclusion is basically a bribery market with no protocol-level inclusion guarantees
There is another profound difference: negative covenants. Because stake can be slashed while ASICs cannot, PoS chains can protocol-enforce prohibitions, which PoW cannot:
- You cannot "equivocate" on fork choice, or you get slashed
- You cannot be offline for too long, or you get slashed
- You cannot censor, or you get slashed
A true social contract has both "thou shalts" and "thou shalt nots." PoS can encode both with force; PoW mainly encodes "thou shalts" and hopes economic behavior follows. If you don't believe me, look at the Bitcoin community's debate over BIP-101, where they are arguing about how to punish miners who include "spam."
ETH can become good money because its monetary properties are not manifested through the ponzi economics and Lindy effect of a "fixed supply," but through "property-like rights" generated by intrinsic system attributes: the "system right" to purchase execution/inclusion, the "system right" to participate, the "system right" to be treated as a first-class citizen in the base protocol—all embodied in the ETH asset.
Ethereum Value Cycle: Utility → Security → Credible Neutrality → More Utility
Ethereum has a cycle that is both economic and constitutional:
- Exercisable rights → Broad participation: Low hardware barriers and permissionless staking allow security to come from a wide range of participants
- Participation → Usage and demand: Credible settlement attracts developers, users, high-value use cases; demand for execution manifests as demand for ETH (fees, collateral, settlement)
- Usage → Fees: The system prices scarce block resources in ETH
- Fees → Validator rewards + Burning: Fees go to validators; high usage burns base fees, tightening supply
- Rewards + Burning → ETH demand: ETH becomes a yield-bearing, security-linked asset, with scarcity increasing with usage
- ETH demand/price → Network security: PoS security is proportional to the value staked and the cost to attack
- Security → Credible neutrality: The harder the consensus is to break, the more credible the claim that rules apply uniformly
- Credible neutrality → Migration of value + complex logic: Important assets and serious contracts will flow to the settlement layer hardest to subvert, feeding back into usage
If any link breaks, the entire thesis weakens. Ethereum's design lies in keeping these links tightly connected in a real circular economy.
Maintaining Credible Neutrality in a Corporate-Dominated World
The cyberpunk twist is here: You should expect powerful institutions to emerge—exchanges, brokerages, payment giants, rollup operators, custodians, even governments and quasi-government entities. They will build rails, optimizing their own incentives. Sometimes coordinating, sometimes coerced, sometimes coercing others.
The question is not "Will corporations use Ethereum?" They already are. The question is:
Can any single company—or corporate alliance—tilt the system to place everyone else in a structurally subordinate position?
This is what "credible neutrality" actually does in the cyberpunk framework. It is not moral purity, but an engineering constraint:
- A credibly neutral base layer is for interoperability of adversarial participants
- If it's not credibly neutral, the strongest participants will eventually win through policy, censorship, or subtle market structure
Ultimately, this points to blockchain's superpower: massively increasing social scalability.
Ethereum becomes the only economic zone where you can realistically have "no special channels," allowing counterparties to interact commercially at scale with low trust and lack of legal recourse.
Inclusion and Censorship Resistance: The Cornerstone of Digital Property Rights
Property requires enforceable exercise rights. If you "own" an asset but cannot transfer, exit, collateralize, or unwind it under pressure, then you don't have true ownership.
On a blockchain, this enforceability boils down to inclusion:
Can you get a valid transaction included in history within a limited time, if you're willing to pay the clearing price?
This is why censorship resistance is key to property rights. This is also why Ethereum research continuously trends towards mechanisms that strengthen inclusion guarantees under adverse conditions—like FOCIL (Fork Choice-based Inclusion Lists), explicitly reducing the freedom of potential censors.
Speed alone doesn't solve the censorship problem. The key variables are:
- The distribution of block production power
- Protocol incentives/penalties
- And explicit inclusion mechanisms when the threat model requires it
If the corporate stack can blacklist you at the settlement layer, that "currency" is fake. ETH's valuation relies on Ethereum making such blacklisting structurally difficult.
Ethereum as a Programmable Legal Base: A Computational Commons with Strong Powers
A useful mental model: View Ethereum as a programmable legal base—a computational commons that remains reliable even when participants are adversarial.
This brings a new institutional primitive:
- Deploy code that represents or executes protocols, markets, registries, rights
- Commit to execution following protocol rules, not the preferences of platform operators
In other words: The ability to make commitments harder to break than those of ordinary institutions, even if the违约方 is wealthy, sophisticated, and willing to litigate forever.
You pay for this execution with the only asset natively recognized by the system: ETH.
ETH is cyberpunk currency because it is a hybrid of:
- Computational credit
- Performance collateral
- Membership credential for a neutral execution jurisdiction
The cyberpunk framework is important because the world we are building is not an "infinite garden." It is a boundary layer between old and new institutions, where law and code mesh like misaligned gears. Ethereum's advantage is that it is hard to change, thus able to serve as shared underlying infrastructure.
L2 Scaling: Don't Let the Plot Go Astray
Rollups are necessary. The rollup-centric roadmap is rational: keep L1 slow enough to maintain decentralization and verifiability, scale execution via L2s that inherit L1 security.
But the cyberpunk risk is also clear: L2s could become corporate enclaves:
- Centralized sequencers can censor or reorder transactions at the user layer
- Tokenomics can shift value capture away from ETH
- Alternative data availability choices can reduce economic coupling with L1
Therefore, an ETH-supporting rollup future should be:
- L2 activity must pay settlement/data fees to L1 in a way that scales with usage (so ETH burning/revenue remains coupled with income and adoption rate)
- L2 neutrality must converge over time towards L1 neutrality (decentralized sequencing, trustless exits, minimized governance attack surface)
- ETH remains the gravitational asset—fees, collateral, staking/margin, the inevitable exchange path
If L2s maintain economic coupling and neutrality inheritance, they are bullish for ETH. Otherwise, they are fragmentation engines: lots of activity, value extracted, guarantees weakened.
In cyberpunk terms: Corporate complexes can exist—but they must not be allowed to quietly overwrite the settlement constitution.
Tokenized Assets: Crypto-Native Assets vs. Blockchain Theater
Tokenization only truly strengthens ETH's narrative if it becomes crypto-native property, not a tokenized IOU with admin keys and terms-of-service kill switches.
The dividing line is simple:
- Is the chain's state transition function itself the authoritative transfer mechanism (or a trigger that traditional institutions must abide by)?
- Or is the token merely a UI pointer to an off-chain registry that can ignore you when inconvenient?
If Ethereum is to become a settlement layer for important assets, you need structures where:
- On-chain events are treated as decisive (or at least presumptively authoritative)
- Execution is minimized to objective cryptographic standards
- Human/legal intervention is narrow, explicit, and handles exceptions—not routine discretionary control
Ethereum's inclusion guarantee mechanisms come into play again. The validity of tokenized rights depends on your ability to exercise them under pressure. We need cyberpunk tokenization protocols on Ethereum.
Conclusion: ETH as Cyberpunk Currency
Cypherpunk gave crypto its moral core: privacy, autonomy, resistance. But the real stage Ethereum is building for is cyberpunk: corporations and new powers coexisting on the same rails, adversarial yet interdependent, each creatively employing technology, each trying to tilt the system.
In that world, currency is more than a store of value. It is:
- An execution credential
- A settlement resource
- A security tool
- A property enforcement primitive
So, "ETH as cyberpunk currency" is ultimately a thesis about constitutional settlement: If Ethereum remains credibly neutral, credibly inclusive, and economically coupled with its scaling layers, then ETH has value not just because people believe in it.
Its value lies in being the one scarce credential in the entire tech stack that no one—neither corporation nor new power—can let others control.
