“Cyberpunk Currency”: Why I’m Still Holding ETH
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“Cyberpunk Currency”: Why I’m Still Holding ETH
If Ethereum remains credibly neutral, credibly inclusive, and economically coupled with its scaling layers, ETH’s value stems not merely from people’s belief in it.
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsBy: _gabrielShapir0
Translated by: AididiaoJP, Foresight News
Thoughts on ETH
Lately, I’ve been thinking deeply about ETH—why do I hold it? Do I want to continue holding it? Why do I believe it has value?
From friends and colleagues, I’ve heard three dominant perspectives on ETH:
- “Bitcoin+”—a store of value against monetary debasement, but “better” because:
- It can be deflationary when needed and inflationary when necessary.
- It has native programmability, enabling use of the currency without reliance on third parties.
- “System equity”—ETH functions like stock in a decentralized compute platform: more users → higher demand for blockspace → higher fees + more ETH burned → greater scarcity.
- “Digital oil”—a commodity-oriented perspective straddling the first two.
These views are not mutually exclusive—they’re simply different lenses on the same thing.
My view relates to them but differs slightly: ETH is a cyberpunk currency—and cyberpunk is precisely what defines the current environment.
Cyberpunk vs. Cypherpunk: Why This Distinction Matters Now
In works like Neuromancer or Cyberpunk 2077, money is less a moral concept than a “routing tool”: credit chains, corporate accounts, street cash, favors—value flows through channels that cannot be fully monitored by any single system. Real power lies with those who can still execute transactions under pressure.
“Money” is everywhere—but the real question is: When large institutional systems turn against you, can you still transact? Identity verification, access control, transaction execution, market exit—all ultimately reduce to one question: Can your transaction still be confirmed, settled, and recognized as valid?
That is the correct lens through which to understand Ethereum.
ETH is not narrowly a “cypherpunk currency” (like ZCash, designed primarily around privacy). It is a cyberpunk currency: an anonymous bearer instrument in a world that is both adversarial and interdependent.
The crypto space has long suffered from a false dichotomy: either you build liberatory technology opposing institutions—or you build enterprise infrastructure, thereby “betraying the ideals.” Reality is far more complex—and far more interesting:
- Large corporations will build and use crypto rails—and already are.
- Crypto stacks will bypass rigid, exploitative, and censorious systems.
Cypherpunk is crypto-driven: privacy, anonymity, secure communication, mathematical resistance to centralized control. It largely excludes “corporate actors,” since enterprises are unwilling to operate in completely unregulated domains.
Cyberpunk is broader and more inclusive: systemic hacking at institutional boundaries—blending technology, law, finance, identity, and social engineering. Here, style is strategy; rules are written in a mixture of code and contracts. Corporations can operate here because compliance, enforcement, and accountability remain possible—yet “outlaws” can too. This makes cyberpunk a universe where all participants can freely interact, interconnect, and subvert one another.
Ethereum sits precisely here: building protocols that let adversarial institutions interoperate—while preserving genuine exit rights and property rights for anyone capable of signing and paying. And using ETH as the currency within that “city of the future”—that is cyberpunk.
ETH as a Cyberpunk Currency
ETH’s value proposition as “money” is often reduced to the “digital gold” narrative—designed to persuade Bitcoin holders and gold enthusiasts. But they already fully believe in BTC—or gold—and won’t switch to ETH.
BTC and gold themselves “carry” nothing—they are memecoins, hedges against fiat inflation and central bank systems as specific sociopolitical philosophies. Personally, I believe this hedge grows increasingly irrelevant in a new deflationary normal driven by AI and robotics.
The cyberpunk vision for ETH is grander—and more intuitively compelling—because ETH always conveys exercisable “system rights” within the Ethereum network. Tightly coupled to the smart contract environment, ETH enables trustless commerce, retaining enduring value even in deflationary environments because:
- It is backed by real economic fundamentals.
- In an increasingly polarized, technocratic society, both enterprises and individuals need an “economic free zone.”
ETH’s Fundamentals
Under proof-of-stake, ETH is not merely a token “representing” value—it is a resource used to purchase transaction execution, inclusion in the blockchain, and participation in consensus:
- With the introduction of FOCIL in the Hegota upgrade, paying validators ETH at the current market rate guarantees your transaction’s inclusion and execution in a block.
- 32 ETH plus consumer-grade hardware lets you activate a validator, participate in proposing/proving blocks, and—roughly speaking—“vote” on whether to adopt certain protocol upgrades.
These network-level powers granted to ETH within the protocol constitute its fundamentals. In practice, they are enforced via explicit state transition functions and penalty mechanisms.
This is also why PoS better supports a cyberpunk currency than PoW:
- ETH grants you native protocol-level operational participation rights: staking is the entry barrier, and staked assets are slashable.
- BTC relies on belief-backed scarcity and durability; mining requires specialized ASIC hardware, unconnected to BTC ownership, and transaction inclusion is essentially a bribery market—with no protocol-layer guarantee of inclusion.
A deeper distinction lies in negative covenants. Because staked assets are slashable while ASICs are not, PoS chains can protocol-enforce prohibitions—PoW cannot:
- You must not equivocate on fork choice—or be slashed.
- You must not stay offline too long—or be slashed.
- You must not censor—or be slashed.
A true social contract contains both “what you must do” and “what you must not do.” PoS can codify both with enforceable force; PoW mainly encodes “what you must do,” then hopes economic behavior follows suit. Don’t believe it? Look at the Bitcoin community’s debate over BIP-101—people are arguing over how to punish miners who include “spam.”
ETH can be good money because its monetary properties don’t rely on Ponzi economics of “fixed supply” and the Lindy effect—but instead arise from intrinsic system properties that generate “quasi-property rights”: the right to purchase execution/inclusion, the right to participate, the right to be treated as a first-class citizen within the base protocol—all embodied in the ETH asset itself.
The Ethereum Value Cycle: Utility → Security → Trusted Neutrality → More Utility
Ethereum operates a cycle that is both economic and constitutional:
- Exercisable rights → Broad participation: Low hardware barriers and permissionless staking make security derive from a wide participant base.
- Participation → Usage and demand: Trusted settlement attracts developers, users, and high-value use cases; demand for execution manifests as demand for ETH (fees, collateral, settlement).
- Usage → Fees: The system prices scarce blockspace in ETH.
- Fees → Validator rewards + burning: Fees go to validators; high usage tightens supply via base fee burning.
- Rewards + burning → ETH demand: ETH becomes an asset tied to yield and security—its scarcity intensifies with usage.
- ETH demand / price → Network security: PoS security scales with staked value and cost of attack.
- Security → Trusted neutrality: The harder consensus is to subvert, the more credible the claim that rules apply uniformly.
- Trusted neutrality → Value + migration of complex logic: Important assets and serious contracts flow to the hardest-to-disrupt settlement layer—feeding back into usage.
If any link breaks, the entire argument weakens. Ethereum’s design ensures these links remain tightly coupled within a true circular economy.
Maintaining Trusted Neutrality in an Enterprise-Dominated World
Here lies the cyberpunk turning point: You should expect powerful institutions to emerge—exchanges, brokerages, payment giants, rollup operators, custodians, even governments and quasi-governmental entities. They’ll build rails and optimize for their own incentives. Sometimes coordinating, sometimes coerced, sometimes coercing others.
The question isn’t “Will enterprises use Ethereum?” They already do. The real question is:
Can any single company—or corporate coalition—tilt the system so that everyone else ends up structurally subordinate?
That is what “trusted neutrality” actually does within the cyberpunk framework. It is not moral purity—it is engineering constraint:
- A trusted-neutral base layer enables interoperability among adversarial participants.
- Without trusted neutrality, the strongest participants will eventually win—via policy, censorship, or subtle market structures.
Ultimately, this points to blockchain’s superpower: massively increasing social scalability.
Ethereum becomes the only economically viable zone where counterparties can conduct large-scale commercial interactions under low trust and without legal recourse—truly “no special access.”
Inclusion and Anti-Censorship: The Bedrock of Digital Property Rights
Property requires enforceable exercise rights. If you “own” an asset but cannot transfer, exit, pledge, or unwind it under pressure, you do not truly own it.
On-chain, that enforceability reduces to inclusion:
Given willingness to pay the clearing price, can you get a valid transaction included in history within a bounded time?
That is why anti-censorship is foundational to property rights—and why Ethereum research continuously gravitates toward strengthening inclusion guarantees under adverse conditions—e.g., FOCIL (Fork Choice Inclusion List), explicitly reducing the discretion of potential censors.
Raw speed alone does not solve censorship. Key variables are:
- Distribution of block production power.
- Protocol incentives / penalties.
- And explicit inclusion mechanisms under required threat models.
If the enterprise stack can blacklist you at the settlement layer, that “currency” is fake. ETH’s valuation depends on Ethereum making such blacklisting structurally difficult.
Ethereum as Programmable Legal Infrastructure: A Powerful Computational Commons
A useful mental model: View Ethereum as a programmable legal infrastructure—a computational commons reliable even among adversarial participants.
This introduces a new institutional primitive:
- Deploying code representing or enforcing protocols, markets, registries, and rights.
- Committing to execution governed by protocol rules—not platform operator preferences.
In other words: Making commitments harder to break than ordinary institutional promises—even when the counterparty is wealthy, sophisticated, and willing to litigate endlessly.
You pay for this execution using the system’s natively recognized sole asset: ETH.
ETH is a cyberpunk currency because it blends three things:
- Computational credit
- Performance collateral
- Membership credential in a neutral execution jurisdiction
The cyberpunk framework matters because the world we’re building is not an “infinite garden.” It is a boundary layer between old institutions and new ones—where law and code mesh like misaligned gears. Ethereum’s advantage lies in its difficulty to change—making it a shared foundational architecture.
L2 Scaling: Don’t Let the Plot Derail
Rollups are necessary. A rollup-centric roadmap is rational: Keep L1 slow enough to preserve decentralization and verifiability, and scale execution via L2s inheriting L1 security.
But the cyberpunk risk is clear: L2s could become corporate enclaves:
- Centralized sequencers can censor or reorder transactions at the user layer.
- Tokenomics can divert value capture away from ETH.
- Alternative data availability choices can weaken economic coupling with L1.
Thus, an ETH-supportive rollup future should ensure:
- L2 activity pays settlement/data fees to L1 in a way that scales with usage (so ETH burn/revenue remains coupled to adoption).
- L2 neutrality converges over time toward L1 neutrality (decentralized sequencing, trusted exits, minimized governance attack surface).
- ETH remains the gravitational asset—fees, collateral, staking/margin, and inevitable conversion path.
If L2s maintain economic coupling and inherit neutrality, they benefit ETH. Otherwise, they become fragmentation engines: massive activity, extracted value, weakened guarantees.
In cyberpunk terms: Corporate cityscapes may exist—but they must not be allowed to quietly overwrite the settlement constitution.
Tokenized Assets: Crypto-Native Assets vs. Blockchain Theater
Tokenization only strengthens ETH’s narrative if it creates crypto-native property—not a token IOU with admin keys and service-terms kill switches.
The line is simple:
- Is the chain’s state transition function itself the authoritative mechanism for transfer (or a trigger that traditional institutions must obey)?
- Or is the token merely a UI pointer to an off-chain registry—one that can ignore you when inconvenient?
For Ethereum to become the 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 exception-handling—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 a Cyberpunk Currency
Cypherpunk gave crypto its moral core: privacy, autonomy, resistance. But the real-world stage Ethereum is building is cyberpunk: enterprises and new forces coexist on the same rails—adversarial yet interdependent—each creatively deploying technology, each trying to tilt the system.
In that world, money is not just a store of value. It is:
- An execution credential
- A settlement resource
- A security tool
- A property enforcement primitive
So “ETH as a cyberpunk currency” is ultimately an argument about constitutional settlement: If Ethereum maintains trusted neutrality, trusted inclusion, and economic coupling with its scaling layers, ETH’s value stems not merely from belief—but from being the only scarce credential in the entire tech stack that neither enterprises nor new forces can allow others to control.
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