There are too few who understand; cryptocurrency is still far from the public.

Written by: Thejaswini MA

Translated by: Baihua Blockchain

"Sofalarity." This is my favorite word of the month / year (depending on what I read next).

I slowly realized that my own exhaustion was precisely the state this system needed me to exhibit in order to maintain its operation; this is not my personal failure. I slump on the bamboo sofa, adopting a posture that will definitely lead to back pain, asking Alexa to brighten the lights. Because what I just read started feeling somewhat uncomfortable and overly personal.

Everyone knows about the "singularity," the theoretical node where AI surpasses human intelligence and everything will change forever. We haven't reached that point yet, but the "sofalarity" is already here with us in this room.

At this node, convenience itself has become so absolute that leaving one platform feels almost as unrealistic as moving to a country where you might not find a bamboo sofa.

The ecosystem you choose to stay in seems to provide convenience that genuinely improves your life without drama or friction. But you can see the friction elsewhere; that’s why we continue making the same choices. But is this truly your own choice, or has the choice already been made for you?

This book describes a phenomenon I think most of us know but can't find the words to express. Staying on a platform that you’re not even sure you like, that (comfortable) heaviness. The feeling of wanting to switch platforms is not impossible, but somehow it makes one feel exhausted before it even begins. The author borrows a term from stoner culture to describe it: "couch lock." The meaning of this term is obvious.

As always, my mind immediately drifts back to cryptocurrency. Can we really build a product smooth enough to create a "couch lock" for people? Or have we made that promise, tried, and failed miserably? Are we completely outside the cozy consumer safe haven, or are we just stuck at its bottom?

Look at how these applications exploit what psychologists call "variable reward schedules" to keep us hooked. This is the addictive slot machine effect of gambling, and this effect is prevalent everywhere in cryptocurrency. Price fluctuations act as one of the most powerful slot machines in history. Most positions do not change significantly. Occasionally, certain assets surge tenfold. This unpredictability triggers strong compulsive checking behaviors, just like scrolling through Instagram notifications and TikTok videos.

The variable reward system of cryptocurrency bypasses the platform and pulls people directly to price charts, where traders' dopamine accumulates. It lacks the habitual system dependency that large tech platforms rely on for profit. This may explain why, after fifteen years, speculation remains the only consumable product cryptocurrency can consistently offer.

Wu explains why platforms spend billions of dollars on seemingly unrelated matters to their core business. Google paid $17 billion for the broadcasting rights to the NFL, or Amazon spent $11 billion to acquire Thursday Night Football. Their goal is time. They want to control enough of your Sunday time to make your entire week naturally revolve around a company's interface.

Every hour you spend in one platform's ecosystem is an hour you haven't thought about whether better options exist elsewhere.

For people in India, there are two choices to watch "The Office": Netflix and Amazon Prime. The perks offered by Amazon make it a decent choice and provide many privileges for Prime users.

"If it's simple, it wins," Wu says.

Bordersless currency, self-custody, and transparent systems are all good. But this pitch requires you to first persuade others to believe that something they think is unbroken is actually broken. Most people walking down the street do not think about how to fix correspondent banking.

The "convenience gap" of the internet is obvious to everyone. "You don’t have to drive to the post office anymore." Okay, convinced.

This before-and-after comparison is apparent and instant. The gap in cryptocurrency is equally real but is almost completely invisible to average people living within it. This inefficiency exists internally within institutions, within settlement layers, and within correspondent banking systems that most people will never need to understand. "Replacing all this with blockchain" sounds completely like a foreign language to the average user.

The Internet replaced things that troubled everyone. Driving to a travel agency to book a flight is annoying. Renting a movie from a video store is bothersome; if you go late, someone else has already taken it. When the Internet removed these barriers, people immediately felt the difference because it made their lives more comfortable. Explaining these solutions to them is acceptable.

Cryptocurrency is replacing many things that most people have never thought about. An average person sending money to a family member abroad only knows it takes days and costs money. They are likely unaware of what correspondent banking is. They don’t care that their $200 remittance goes through three or four intermediary banks before reaching its destination, with each charging a fee. They only know that the money can more or less reach there, and that they will continue to use it next month.

If you switch this entire system to blockchain technology, the experience of the sender remains largely the same. It might be faster. The fees might be lower. However, their lives undergo no visible change. They won’t have an "oh, I no longer need to do that" epiphany. That’s the problem.

Adoption has always been the challenge facing the industry, not the consumers. As long as cryptocurrency requires explanation to be understood, no matter how good the technology is, it will always fall into the "nerd" category.

What else is missing from cryptocurrency? The chapter about data needs to be viewed from a completely new perspective.

Google and Meta’s total advertising revenue reached $360 billion in 2024 because they spent twenty years collecting your every move. Every scroll or long pause on a post has helped them build a machine capable of predicting your next action. Brands pay billions for this prediction. And we have built this engine for them completely free since the moment we opened our first account.

Wu likens this to a poker game where your opponents have watched you play every hand. They remember your bluffs and your worst calls. They are playing within the rules, but they see through your intentions. This advantage accumulates through billions of independent rounds, ultimately giving rise to a massive corporate empire.

I reconsidered to see if cryptocurrency has something similar. No, I’m not referring to prediction markets.

The entire Bitcoin blockchain (including every transaction since 2009) is about 611 GB. Meta processes more data every few hours than that. Ethereum’s on-chain data is richer, but it captures only financial behavior: wallet addresses, transaction amounts, and protocol interactions. It shows what someone did with their money but doesn’t provide insight into the "why." It misses countless small daily choices that make behavior prediction commercially valuable.

Every week, 900 million people use ChatGPT, sharing work documents, medical issues, their anxieties, and business strategies. This helps them. When they use it, they don’t see the privacy trade-offs.

People often give up their private search histories and location data to big tech companies for everyday convenience. It’s unrealistic to suddenly expect the same audience to deeply care about financial autonomy and transparent ledgers. Some people do care. Some care but are too busy with work. This pitch only appeals to those who are already convinced. If you want to achieve mass adoption and create "everything apps," this approach is ineffective for growth.

Wu challenges Shoshana Zuboff’s view on "surveillance capitalism." She claims that platforms create Skinner boxes. They are like mini-games that entice our brains to check them over and over by offering surprise rewards. He counters that large-scale attention manipulation existed long before big data on the internet emerged. I agree with him on this point.

Goebbels didn’t need recommendation algorithms. Yes, the framework of "totalitarian control" is somewhat overstated.

Look at the variable reward mechanisms. As discussed at the beginning of the article, cryptocurrency has them too. The way prices constantly rise and fall is like a massive, thrilling surprise game. But that feeling of excitement never locks you into a practical daily application.

The more you rely on a tool, the worse your ability to do this without it becomes. When that tool is simply a calculator, it’s not a big deal. But when that tool is infrastructure owned and controlled by others, things get complicated.

Cryptocurrency has repeatedly perpetuated this problem. Developers build on sequencers they cannot control. Protocols depend on liquidity providers who can leave at any time. Applications hinge on chains operated by a few validators. Each layer feels like progress, but it’s not entirely so. You built something on someone else’s foundation, and now you can’t move an inch without their permission. Web2 was similarly structured. When AWS goes down, half the internet goes down with it.

Now, we can look back at the analogy of IBM. IBM dominated that era by building elite enterprise-grade infrastructure, allowing applications to run on top of it, completely bypassing the battle for consumer "couch lock."

The best outcome for cryptocurrency reality may look more like this, something we have only recently realized. Settlement rails, institutional clearing, cross-border infrastructure—no one wants to start from scratch to rebuild.

This is a significant achievement, even if it's entirely different from the dream of consumer-grade super applications.

In the latter half of the book, the content shifts from technology to uncover how the same corporate tactics dominate the healthcare and housing sectors. I think it's very important to mention this.

Welsh, Carson, Anderson, and Stowe acquired anesthesia practices in various cities because patients in a sedated state cannot shop around. Prices increased by 26% from 2012 to 2017. One patient even received a bill for $108,951.

Invitation Homes has spent $150 million weekly purchasing foreclosed homes since 2012, now owning over 110,000 properties, paying $48 million in FTC fines in 2024, and mailing average refunds of $106 to 444,131 tenants. However, in the quarter following the settlement, rents still grew by 4.5%.

We treat tokenizing real-world assets (RWA) as the best tool for achieving financial inclusion, arguing that fractionalized real estate will make wealth more accessible to more people. But does breaking a house into digital tokens really help local buyers compete against a company that spends $150 million weekly on acquisitions?

All it does is digitize the inventory for the giant corporations. Large companies own 1% of housing across the United States, but they control 25% of housing in Atlanta and 21% in Jacksonville.

A more liquid cryptocurrency layer, ironically, allows Wall Street to more easily buy out these markets. Tokenization cannot stop corporate landlords; it merely creates a faster ledger for them to collect rents. Cryptocurrency plays a dual role here; it is entirely neutral and not an automatic savior of all.

The platform model merely accelerates extraction, making the process incredibly efficient and unavoidable. A private equity firm with a single anesthesia clinic is just operating an isolated business. But when a single entity buys out all the clinics in major metropolitan centers, the game changes completely. By coordinating through shared software, corporate owners raise fees uniformly across hundreds of healthcare institutions. Individual doctors operate in blindness, unable to see the full picture of the pitfalls. This is old-fashioned greed operating on more advanced infrastructure.

Wu is very careful in drawing boundaries. I am less cautious. The deep mechanisms of these industries reveal a slow process of primitive accumulation within the American middle class. This corporate transformation effectively forces doctors back into standard labor and shackles homeowners into lifetime rentals.

The platform model relies entirely on captive audiences and centralized gates. But we have a technology designed fundamentally to smash these gates. It empowers sovereign individuals to build their own systems, completely outside the reach of the exploitative class. That is the real moat.