Written by: _gabrielShapir0

Compiled by: AididiaoJP, Foresight News

Thoughts on ETH

Recently, I have 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 have heard three main viewpoints about ETH:

• "Bitcoin +"—a store of value against currency devaluation, but "better" because:
• It can deflate when needed and inflate as necessary
• It has native programmability, allowing the use of this currency without relying on third parties
• "System equity"—ETH acts like a stock in a decentralized computing platform: the more users there are → the greater the demand for block space → the more fees + the more ETH is destroyed → the higher the scarcity
• "Digital oil"—a commodity view that sits between the first two

These viewpoints are not mutually exclusive; they are just different angles on the same thing.

My viewpoint relates to them but is slightly different: ETH is a cyberpunk currency, and cyberpunk is reflected in the current environment.

Cyberpunk vs. Cryptopunk: Why This Distinction Matters Now

In works like "Neuromancer" and "Cyberpunk 2077", currency is less a moral concept and more a "routing tool": credit chains, corporate accounts, street cash, personal favors—value flows through various channels that cannot be completely monitored by any system. The ones who truly have a voice are those who can still transact under pressure.

"Money" is everywhere, but the real key question is: can you still transact when the corporate system is against you? Authentication, access, executing transactions, exiting markets—all of these ultimately boil down to one question: can you still get your transactions confirmed, settled, and recognized as valid?

This is the right angle to understand Ethereum.

ETH is not a strictly defined "cryptopunk currency" (like ZCash, which focuses on privacy). It is a cyberpunk currency: in a world that is both confrontational and interdependent, it is an anonymous credential.

There has always been a false dichotomy in the crypto space: either you are building liberating technology against institutions, or you are building corporate infrastructure and therefore have "betrayed the ideals." The reality is more complex and interesting:

• Corporations will build and use crypto rails; they are already doing so
• Crypto stacks will bypass rigidity, exploitation, and censorship

Cryptopunk is an outcome driven by crypto: privacy, anonymity, secure communication, resisting centralized control with mathematical tools. It essentially completely excludes "corporate-side" because businesses are unwilling to transact in completely unregulated domains.

Cyberpunk, on the other hand, is broader and more inclusive: hacking the system boundaries—integration of technology, law, finance, identity, social engineering, where style is strategy and rules are written in a blend of code and contracts. Corporations can operate here because compliance, enforcement, and accountability are possible, but "outlaws" can also do so—this makes cyberpunk a universe where all participants can freely interact, couple, and disrupt.

Ethereum's positioning is right here: building protocols that allow opposing entities to operate with each other while reserving true exit rights and property rights for anyone who can sign and pay. Using ETH as currency in that "city of the future," that is cyberpunk.

ETH as Cyberpunk Currency

The value proposition of ETH as a "currency" is often simplified to a "digital gold" narrative, trying to persuade Bitcoin holders and gold enthusiasts. But they are already completely convinced by BTC or gold and are not going to switch to ETH.

BTC and gold themselves do not "carry" anything—they are a kind of memecoin, a hedge against fiat currency inflation and the central bank system as a specific social philosophy. Personally, I believe that this type of hedge will become increasingly irrelevant in the new deflationary normal brought about by AI and robotics.

The vision of ETH as a cyberpunk currency is grander and has more intuitive appeal because ETH is always transferring actionable "system rights" within the Ethereum network system. ETH is closely tied to the smart contract environment, enabling "trustless" commerce, which allows it to maintain ongoing value in a deflationary environment because:

• It has real economic fundamentals supporting its value
• In an increasingly polarized, technology-dominated society, both corporations and individuals need an "economic autonomous region"

Fundamentals of ETH

Under the proof-of-stake mechanism, ETH does not just "represent" value; it is a resource used to purchase the ability to have your transactions executed, included in the blockchain, and participate in consensus:

• As Ethereum joins FOCIL in the Hegota upgrade, paying validators in ETH at the current market rate ensures your transaction is included in a block and executed
• 32 ETH plus consumer-grade hardware can activate a validator to propose/prove blocks and (roughly speaking) "vote" on whether to adopt certain protocol upgrades

These network powers within the protocol are its fundamentals. In practice, they are enforced by explicit state transition functions plus penalty mechanisms.

This is why PoS can support cyberpunk currency better than PoW:

• ETH gives you native operational participation rights in the protocol: staking is the threshold, and collateral can be forfeited
• BTC's scarcity and durability are supported by belief; the mining threshold relies on specialized ASIC hardware, which has no intrinsic connection to BTC ownership, and transaction inclusion is essentially a bribery market without inclusion guarantees at the protocol layer

There is also a profound distinction: negative contracts. Because collateral can be forfeited and ASICs cannot, PoS chains can enforce prohibitions protocol-wise, which PoW cannot:

• You cannot "equivocate" on fork choices; otherwise, you will be penalized
• You cannot stay offline for too long; otherwise, you will be penalized
• You cannot censor; otherwise, you will be penalized

True social contracts entail both "what should be done" and "what should not be done." PoS can enforce both through coercive coding; PoW mainly encodes "what should be done" and then hopes that economic behavior meets expectations. If you don't believe it, check the Bitcoin community's debates about BIP-101, where everyone is arguing about how to punish miners who include "spam."

ETH can become a good currency because its monetary attributes are not manifested through the "fixed total supply" of Ponzi economics and the Lindy effect, but through the "quasi-property rights" generated by the system's inherent properties: the "system rights" to purchase execution/inclusion, the "system rights" to participate, and the "system rights" seen as first-class citizens in the foundational protocol—all of which are embodied in the asset of ETH.

Ethereum's value cycle: utility → security → trusted neutrality → more utility

Ethereum has a cycle that is both economic and constitutional:

• Exercisable rights → broad participation: low hardware thresholds and permissionless staking allow security to come from widespread participants
• Participation → usage and demand: trusted settlement attracts developers, users, and high-value use cases, with demand for execution manifesting as demand for ETH (fees, collateral, settlement)
• Usage → fees: the system prices scarce block resources in ETH
• Fees → validator rewards + destruction: fees go to validators; when usage is high, basic fee destruction tightens supply
• Rewards + destruction → demand for ETH: ETH becomes an asset linked to yields and security, and its scarcity intensifies with use
• Demand/price of ETH → network security: PoS security is proportional to the value of staked collateral and the cost of destruction
• Security → trusted neutrality: the harder it is to undermine consensus, the more credible the claims of uniformly applicable rules become
• Trusted neutrality → value + the migration of complex logic: important assets and serious contracts will flow to the least disruptable settlement layers, feeding back to usage

If any segment breaks, the entire argument weakens. The design of Ethereum lies in keeping these segments tightly connected in a real circular economy.

Maintaining Trusted Neutrality in a Corporate-Dominated World

The turning point of cyberpunk is here: you should expect powerful institutions to emerge—exchanges, brokerage firms, payment giants, rollup operators, custodians, and even government and quasi-government entities. They will build rails and optimize their own incentives. Sometimes coordinating, sometimes coerced, sometimes coercing others.

The question is not "Will corporations use Ethereum?" They are already using it. The question is:

Is there any company—or corporate alliance—that can tilt the system, making everyone else structurally subordinate?

This is what "trusted neutrality" is actually doing within the cyberpunk framework. It is not about moral purity but about engineering constraints:

• A trusted neutral foundation layer allows for interoperability of adversarial participants
• If it is not trusted neutral, the strongest participants will ultimately prevail through policy, censorship, or subtle market structures

Ultimately, this points to the superpower of blockchains: greatly enhancing social scalability.

Ethereum becomes the only economic zone where you can realistically have "no special channels," allowing counterparties to interact on a large scale in a low-trust, non-legal-recourse environment.

Inclusion and Anti-Censorship: The Cornerstone of Digital Property Rights

Property requires enforceable rights of exercise. If you "own" an asset but cannot transfer, exit, collateralize, or dissolve it under pressure, what you have is not true ownership in the meaningful sense.

On blockchains, this enforceability boils down to inclusion:

As long as you are willing to pay the settlement price, can you get a valid transaction included in history within a limited time?

This is why anti-censorship is key to property rights. This is also why Ethereum research continuously trends toward strengthening inclusion guarantees under adverse conditions—like FOCIL (Fork Choice Mandatory Inclusion List), which explicitly reduces the latitude of potential censoring entities.

Speed alone does not solve censorship issues. The key variables are:

• The distribution of block production power
• Protocol incentives/penalties
• And clear inclusion mechanisms needed in threat models

If a corporate stack can blacklist you at the settlement layer, then this "currency" is fake. The valuation of ETH relies on Ethereum making such blacklisting structurally difficult.

Ethereum as a Programmable Legal Foundation: A Public Domain of Powerful Computation

A useful mental model: think of Ethereum as a programmable legal foundation—a reliable computational public domain, even if participants are adversarial.

This brings a new institutional idiom:

• Deploying code that represents or enforces protocols, markets, registries, rights
• Committing to executing in accordance with protocol rules rather than the preferences of platform operators

In other words: being able to make commitments that are harder to violate than regular institutional commitments, even when the defaulting party is wealthy, seasoned, and willing to litigate relentlessly.

You pay for this enforcement with the only asset recognized natively by the system: ETH.

ETH is a cyberpunk currency because it is a blend of the following three:

• Computational credit
• Performance collateral
• Membership credentials of neutral execution jurisdictions

The importance of the cyberpunk framework is that the world we build is not an "infinite garden." It is a boundary layer between the old regime and the newly built regime, where law and code mesh together like misaligned gears. Ethereum's advantage is its difficulty in being altered, thus enabling it to become a shared underlying architecture.

L2 Scaling: Don't Let the Narrative Drift

Rollups are necessary. The rollup-centered roadmap is rational: keep L1 slow enough to maintain decentralization and verifiability, while using L2, which inherits L1's security, to scale execution.

But the risks of cyberpunk are also evident: L2 could become corporate enclaves:

• Centralized sequencers could censor or reorder transactions at the user layer
• Token economics could siphon value away from ETH
• Alternative data availability options could weaken economic coupling with L1

Therefore, rollups supporting ETH in the future should be:

• L2 activities must pay settlement/data fees to L1 in a manner that scales with usage (so the destruction/income of ETH remains coupled with revenue and adoption rates)
• The neutrality of L2 must converge over time towards the neutrality of L1 (decentralized sequencing, trustworthy exits, minimal governance attack surface)
• ETH must remain a gravitational asset—fees, collateral, staking/margin, and inevitable exchange paths

If L2 can maintain economic coupling and inherit neutrality, they are beneficial to ETH. Otherwise, they are fragmentation engines: a lot of activity with value siphoned away, and guarantees weakened.

In cyberpunk terms: corporate complexes can exist—but they must not be allowed to quietly override the settlement constitution.

Tokenized Assets: Crypto-Native Assets and the Blockchain Theater

Tokenization only truly strengthens the narrative of ETH when it becomes crypto-native property, rather than a token IOU with administrator keys and a service terms termination switch.

The boundary is simple:

• Is the state transition function of the chain itself an authoritative transfer mechanism (or a trigger that traditional institutions must comply with)?
• Or is the token merely a UI pointer to an off-chain registry that can ignore you when it's inconvenient?

If Ethereum is to become the settlement layer for significant assets, you need a structure like this:

• On-chain events are viewed as decisive (or at least presumptively authoritative)
• Execution is minimized to objective cryptographic standards
• Human/legal interventions are narrow, explicit, and deal with exceptions—not regular discretionary control

Ethereum's inclusion guarantee mechanisms play a role again. The validity of tokenized rights depends on your ability to exercise it under pressure. We need cyberpunk tokenization protocols on Ethereum.

Conclusion: ETH as Cyberpunk Currency

Cryptopunk gave crypto its moral core: privacy, autonomy, resistance. But Ethereum is building a stage where the reality is cyberpunk: corporations and new powers coexist on the same rails, confrontational yet interdependent, each creatively using technology, each trying to tilt the system.

In that world, currency 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 cyberpunk currency" ultimately becomes an argument about constitutional settlement: if Ethereum maintains trusted neutrality, trusted inclusivity, and keeps economic coupling with its scaling layers, then the value of ETH is not just because people believe in it.

Its value lies in its being the only scarce credential in the entire technology stack that no one—neither companies nor new powers—can control over others.