The Cathedral's twilight: when the idea of encryption becomes a speculative casino

Not long ago, I readAn open letter from IOSG founder, Jocy, to Crystal OG, ChinaI don't know. In her letter, Jocy quotes Buffet: "For the next 100 years, the cathedral will not be eaten by casinos. I don't know

Josie used this metaphor to describe the difficulty of the encryption industry: on the one hand, the grand cathedral built with codes and ideals, and on the other hand, the huge casinos full of speculation and speculation。

Just a few days after the letter was sent, a developer named Peter Steinberger, because of the open-source AI project that he developed during his amateur time, Clawd Bot, went red overnight。

But just on the day of the project, a group of encrypted currency speculators, without Peter's knowledge, quickly released a Meme coin called the CLAWD, which was once fired up to $16 million. Later, Peter tweeted that he would never issue any encrypted currency, would not be involved in any meme currency, and asked "Crypto Folks" not to harass him again。

Speculators believe that Peter's statements led to a collapse in currency prices, that they took over his GitHub account in the course of the project's renaming, and that he himself launched a crazy cyber siege and physical harassment to hold Peter responsible for the fraud that the speculators themselves created。

This is probably the last time I want to admit I'm a encryption practitioner。

The whole encryption industry is going through a huge collapse. Not only is the casino boom not returned to the cathedral, it is actively destroying those who are trying to build it。

What happened in the encryption industry from mid-2009, when he dug up the creation block of bitcoin, to 2026, 17 years? How did that cathedral, built by code and ideals, be turned into a casino full of dice and wailing

The church bell

To answer that question, let us go back to the beginning of everything and to the time when the bells were still clear。

For a long time after Bitcoin was born, the mainstream narrative of the industry was about construction. Early participants, mostly code punks, liberals and technocrats, were obsessed with the de-centreized utopia depicted by Chinese and tried to add bricks to the cathedral with a line code。

Even Memecoin, Dogecoin, the best known in the industry, was initially glowing in idealism。

In December 2013, Billy Markus and Jackson Palmer, two software engineers working in IBM and Adobe, decided to create a "pure" encrypted currency in order to sarcasticize the growing trend of encrypted currency speculation. Markus changed bitcoin's code slightly, changed the font to a funny comic book and replaced the bitcoin's icon with a wooddog face bag that was popular on the Internet. That's how the dog coin was born。

"It was created to make a joke," Markus recalled in an open letter after many years, "We have no expectations or plans." I don't know

But this joke unexpectedly triggered the most unique community in the encrypted world. Early dogmies, who don't care about price increases and drops, are keen to reward culture, to praise their favorite content in social media with less than a cent worth of dogmies. In this near-free way, they convey happiness, goodwill and creativity。

In 2014, they raised $30,000 worth of dog money for the poorly funded Jamaican sleigh team to help them board the Sochi Winter Olympics; they raised funds for water wells in water-scarrying areas in Kenya; and they sponsored a NASCAR racer named Josh Wise, who drove a car with a wooden dog head on top of the most popular car race in the United States。

"Happiness, goodness, learning, giving, common sense, fun, community, inspiration, creativity, generosity, foolishness and absurdity," Markus in his open letter defined the true value of the dog coin, "If the community embodies it, it is the true value. I don't know

It's the most exciting profile of the cathedral era. At that time, it was believed that the power of consensus could turn a joke into a force for good。

This passion for construction peaked in DeFi Summer in 2020. The builders of the Taifeng have built a decentralised financial world without permission and trust with smart contracts. From Uniswap to Loan Agreements Compund and Aave, a Lego-style financial application was built, and the entire encrypted world's TVL rose from less than $700 million in just one year to $1176 billion. A completely new financial paradigm is rising on the horizon。

Until 2021, something started to go wrong. That year, with the impact of the new epidemic, the world’s central banks launched an unprecedented currency printing model, with US economic stimulus packages of up to $5 trillion. Hundreds of trillions of hot money went into the market, looking for any assets that could be speculative. Encrypted currency became the craziest main course of this liquidity feast。

The price of bitcoin rose by 788 per cent in one year and by 1264 per cent in the Tokyo. According to the survey, young Americans between the ages of 25 and 34, half of the stimulus checks they received were placed in encrypted currency and stock markets。

Money, never so cheap, never so real, never dream of being rich overnight。

The bells of the cathedral are gradually being drowned by the dice of the casino。

The tyranny of the united

The French social psychologist Gustave Le Pen, in his book "The Uncorrupts of the Union", has made a precise conclusion:

“When an individual becomes a member of a group, he will no longer be responsible for his actions. At this point, everyone is exposed to the instinct of being bound when alone. ...the group is impulsive, volatile and angry. It is completely dominated by unintentional motives. I don't know

In the encrypted world after 2021, when communities are no longer bound by shared visions and values, but are bound by the fragile interests of shared silos, the "community-driven" quickly dissipated into "the tyranny of the united."。

The first to be sacrificed was the spiritual totem of the dog coin, its creator, Billy Markus。

As the dog coin was fired hundreds and thousands of times more in 2021, Markus' social media box was flooded with damp private letters, and people were madly asking him to "do something" to make the dog coin worth more。

They don't care that Markus sold all his dog coins in 2015 because he was laid off, that in all, he bought only a used Honda; they don't care that Markus' mother is losing her house because she can't pay the mortgage。

They only care about themselves。

"When I saw shit, greed, fraud," Markus wrote in his open letter, "I'm not angry, I'm just disappointed. I don't know

If the attack on Markus is only a prelude to this tyranny, then the siege of God V has pushed this farce to its first orgasm。

IN MAY 2021, SHIB, WITHOUT ANY COMMUNICATION, DIRECTLY ENTERED 50 PER CENT OF THE TOTAL CURRENCY OF THE PROJECT INTO V GOD ' S PUBLIC WALLET, WHICH WAS WORTH UP TO $8 BILLION IN NOMINAL TERMS. THEIR CALCULATIONS ARE VERY CLEVER, AND V GOD IS THE WORLD-RECOGNIZED "GOD" ENCRYPTED, AND IF HE DOESN'T SELL IT, IT'S THE STRONGEST CREDIT ENDORSEMENT FOR SHIB; IF HE SELLS IT, IT'S GOOD TO HAVE A LOT OF TOKENS DESTROYED。

IT'S A CAREFULLY DESIGNED MORAL KIDNAPPING. THEY PUT V GOD IN A DILEMMA, WHATEVER HIS CHOICE, SEEMS TO SERVE ONLY THE INTERESTS OF SPECULATORS。

But V, in the most decisive way, has completed his rejection of this sacrifice. He donated $1.3 billion worth of SHIB to the Indian New Crown Epidemic Assistance Fund, destroyed most of the remaining coins, sold a large amount of "donated" animal meme and made real donations to charitable organizations。

He's like a big parent who cleans up the gates, trying to wake up those who are obsessed with Meme fanatics by smashing it over and over again. From 2021 to 2025, he sold and donated several Meme coins, turning them into animal welfare funds, bio-technology research funds and disaster assistance funds. “I hope that Meme coin creators will contribute directly to charity instead of calling me the money.” I don't know

HOWEVER, HIS RESISTANCE SEEMED SO WEAK IN THE FACE OF THE GROUP'S SPECULATIVE DESIRE. THE BELIEVERS QUICKLY FOUND A NEW EXPLANATION FOR HIS BEHAVIOR: "V GOD IS HELPING US DESTROY THE COIN, IT'S GOOD!" "V IS MARKETING, HE'S ACTUALLY SUPPORTING US! I DON'T KNOW

All facts can be distorted in the group logic described in " The Unified " to serve collective emotions and illusions。

If the sacrifice of God to V was also a religious myth, by 2026, when the iron fist of tyranny struck Peter Steinberger, the developer of Clawd Bot, it had become a naked kidnapping。

The speculators no longer need God's endorsement, they can "create" a god directly and then tie him to their chariot. When Peter refused to launch the CIAWD scam for them, he turned from a admired hero to a traitor who had to be eliminated. Misappropriation of accounts, verbal attacks, personal trust harassment All means are used to force him to do so。

THEY'RE IN THE NAME OF THE COMMUNITY, THEY'RE IN TYRANNY, AND THE ONLY PLATFORM IS LINE K。

How large-scale disasters can be created by an industry community, from a collaborative network based on a common ideal, to a violent machine based on a common space

11.6 million bullets

The answer is a collective suicide boom。

According to the annual report published by the encryption data analysis company CoinGecko, in 2025 the encryption world created 119 million new tokens. This means that, on average, more than 32,000 new "assets" were born each day. And the other set of data is that in the same year, 11.6 million encryption projects were dying。

By comparison, in 2021, the number of projects that failed in the top of the bull market was 2584. In four years, this number has increased 4489 times。

When coins become an industry, what we get is not diversity of values, but the scale of garbage。

The catastrophe was the result of a combination of technological advances, macro-watering and human greed. On the one hand, a new generation of public chains, such as Solana, has increased the speed of transactions 100 times, while at the same time reducing costs 1,000 times, while the emergence of several dollar-denominated instruments, such as pump.fun, has reduced the threshold from creating a block chain to a mouse click. Advances in technology have unexpectedly provided the perfect hotbed for the scale of disasters。

On the other hand, the unprecedented global outpouring of water in 2020-2021 completely changed the market ' s risk preferences. When money is no longer worth money, and traditional returns on value investments are so poor, people are rushing for volatility. The value of an asset is no longer important, but whether it provides sufficient volatility to meet the desire for rapid enrichment。

So we see the most ridiculous scene in the encrypted world: the whole industry is fighting for meme。

The only value for the existence of social applications known as Web2, block-chain games claiming to build a mescosystem, star projects with the Layer2 amplification program is to be sold and sold by the diaspora on the secondary market。

When there is no difference in function between a Layer2 token and a fuel canine, we have to admit that everything inside the casino is Meme。

This 11.6 million zero tokens, like 11.6 million bullets into the future of the encrypted world. Each one is telling the world that the industry is not trustworthy. And what is the price to be paid by those who really want to build a cathedral when the incentives of an industry are completely oriented towards speculation rather than innovation

The Death of the Builder

They are experiencing triple deaths。

The first death is physical and mental social。

The story of the developer of Clawd Bot, Peter Steinberger, is only a microcosm of the plight of countless builders. When a developer invests months or even years in the creation of a truly valuable and popular product, the possibility is not flowers and applause, but a bunch of sharks that smell blood。

They turn your projects, your name, your reputation into leverage in their casinos. If you obey, you become an accomplice to a fraud; if you resist, you become an enemy that must be eliminated。

The second highest death is the death of the idol of the spiritual leader。

V. THE RESISTANCE OF GOD IS A TRAGEDY OF DON QUIJOTE. HE TRIED TO USE HIS POWER AGAINST THE FALL OF AN INDUSTRY. HE SOLD, DONATED, AND MADE PUBLIC APPEALS, BUT IN RETURN, THE CYNICISM AND THE INCREASING KIDNAPPING OF THE MOB。

The industry loses its last moral veil when the spiritual leader of an industry whose physical integrity can only be interpreted as good by gamblers。

In the evening of this idol, the lighthouse of the spirit was completely extinguished。

The third death is capital death at the top。

When the image of the Meme dollar casino became the most prominent label for the entire industry, the smart money that tried to invest in long-term value began to turn its back. In 2025, the chief technical officer of a16z crypto, Eddy Lazzarin, who was known for having dared to bet on the future, publicly stated in social media that “Meme coin is undermining the long-term vision of many builders. It looks like a risk-ridden casino at best. I don't know

It's not just an executive's complaint. It's a dangerous signal. It means that top-level designers in the industry are losing confidence in the future. When capital is no longer willing to finance cathedral projects that require long-term investment, but only to pursue short, flat casino games, the source of innovation is completely cut off。

More deadly is the proliferation of Meme coins, which provides the perfect ammunition for regulatory agencies around the world. It has labeled the entire industry as fraud, money-laundering, high-risk speculation and has exposed projects and businesses that have been working for years to comply. In 2025, the United States RICO Act was cited in collective lawsuits against platforms such as pump.fun, which, you know, was originally used to combat mafia。

We looked up at the stars and dreamed of changing the world by code, but now we're in the mud, looking for the next 100 times in the head of animals and celebrities. What do we have left when the builders are exiled, when spiritual leaders are dissolved, when capital and regulation are red lighted

# The bell dice sighs, the sound in the ear #

Seventeen years ago, in the Genesis block, Sino-Bun-Bun quoted the title of The Times, who wanted to create a financial world that would not overwhelm money and would not be corrupted by banks。

Seventeen years later, when an developer was under siege for creating something of value, we had to admit that the industry was proving as quickly as possible that it was not worthy of the future。

When this feverish tide retreats, it will leave a vast ruin of trust. On the ruins, do we choose to continue playing this game of gambling with survivors' deviations, or do we choose to find a new heart to recognize, follow and become those who still keep ringing the bells of the cathedral in the ruins

This will be an inescapable issue for every participant in the encrypted world. Bells, dice, sighs will continue to echo over the industry for a long time。

Long time。