Written by: NingNing
In the current industry, when "questioning Ponzi" is regarded as naive and "understanding Ponzi and becoming Ponzi" becomes the mainstream idea, this new work by Mr. Loki is like a beam of light shining into the "Plato's Cave", reminding the crypto industry deep in the cave that it needs to collectively turn back to face the real world and solve real problems.
No matter how popular disk science is, I don’t believe that Ponzi will be the endgame of encryption. No matter how sophisticated the design of the Ponzi disk is, it is essentially a physical dissipative system that requires continuous input of energy or matter from the outside to maintain its structure and function.
Viewing the Ponzi disk from the perspective of a physical dissipative system:
“Low Entropy” Energy = New Investor’s Money
The “ordered structure” of the system = the pyramid of investors
“High entropy” waste = loss of funds and loss of trust
Lower energy quality = more and more new capital is needed to maintain the same rate of return
Limited external resources = limited pool of potential investors
Entropy accumulation = overall decline in market trust
Rising costs to maintain structures = increasingly expensive to attract new investors
Just as any dissipative system will eventually collapse due to the inability to obtain enough "low entropy" energy, the Ponzi scheme will inevitably collapse due to the depletion of new funds. This is not accidental, but the inevitable result of the law of increasing entropy.
The crypto industry has come to where it is today, thanks to the early Bitcoin OG preaching and the subsequent top VCs such as A16Z and Pentera constantly creating new narratives and building new primitives. From the perspective of market theory, they are creating markets on the one hand, attracting new investor funds on the other, and then exiting in the bull market cycle. However, this "business model" has been involuted to this day, and may have approached the upper limit of this dissipative system. For example, the penetration rate of cryptocurrency in the US market has exceeded 20%.
The path to breaking the impasse lies in the old-fashioned construction of projects that continuously innovate, improve efficiency, and create real value. This is because continuous innovation, efficiency improvement, and value creation can keep the system in a state of "far from equilibrium", in which the system may produce new and unexpected structures and functions, further enhancing its sustainability.
Therefore, the crypto industry urgently needs its own "ChatGPT" moment. The recently popular new tracks such as PayFi, Consumer Chain, AI Agent with Crypto Wallet, and chain abstraction are all new solutions born under such environmental pressure.
Of course, when evaluating the value of these projects, we need to reflect on the popular inherent thinking such as technological determinism, background determinism, Infra worship, etc., and return to products and growth.
