On April 13, guests on the CRYPTOCENOSIS stage at ForkLog’s All Time Half 2024 conference discussed the current state of the crypto market, the Austrian school of economics, meme coins, AI tokens and the prospects for the coming bull market. Here are the key takeaways.
Is Bitcoin a replacement for the existing financial infrastructure?
Briefly: Locally, yes; globally, not yet.
Yevgeny Romanenko (Trustee Global): Answering this requires knowledge of two fields: economic history and the Austrian school.
The modern fiat system has existed for roughly 53 years, since the infamous “Nixon shock” of 1971. It is a fairly young construct; before it came the gold standard.
Bitcoin is 15 years old. The narrative that it would replace central banks was popular in 2017. Industry participants saw (and still see) the first cryptocurrency as an alternative medium of exchange.
Eight years on, Bitcoin has not become a mass medium of exchange—what economists call money. For most users, digital gold is a store of value.
“Anyone can use Bitcoin as a medium of exchange (that is, as a substitute for a central bank) or as an investment asset. Before Bitcoin we did not have that option.”
Why is the Austrian school unpopular?
Briefly: People believe state resources are limitless.
Yevgeny Romanenko: The state rests on an irrational belief in its omnipotence and immunity to the laws of human action, the market, praxeology and economic theory.
One can point to Hegel’s philosophy, his historical determinism and the German historical school, with which the Austrian school once publicly locked horns in the “Methodenstreit”.
What happens when genuine economic science appears in the person of Carl Menger, who says:
“You are mistaken. You are not all-powerful; you are not omnipotent. Scarcity cannot be overcome by a Führer, a leader, or a democratically elected government. By lowering interest rates and printing money you merely distort incentives and end up with widespread malinvestment, crises, great depressions. The entire twentieth century is simply a detailed confirmation of this worldview.”
Will they say thank you? No. They will lynch the bearers of the new view. The Austrian school is unpopular because it is a science that destroys faith.
What does crypto have in common with the Austrian school of economics?
Briefly: The idea of economic freedom.
Yevgeny Romanenko: Without economics you cannot grasp the laws that operate in crypto.
The core branch of the Austrian school — catallactics — studies fundamental market phenomena: direct and indirect exchange of goods, and prices as reflections between them. The fourth part of “Human Action” by Ludwig von Mises is devoted to it.
Blockchain has created a new kind of good — cryptocurrency — which is, essentially, property. It has value, prices, exchange, markets.
“Note that to understand market phenomena, knowledge of the technology itself is not enough. That only explains what is under the hood. You cannot do without economic theory — namely the Austrian school.”
The Austrian school includes the theory of indirect exchange. It implies that money should be commodities. For most of history that was gold.
The purchasing power of commodity money arises in the market. No one can change it in their own interest — for example, crash it or devalue it.
“At its core Bitcoin is about economic freedom and a return to the gold standard via a technology the state cannot control as it would like. To any adherent of the Austrian school it is obvious that Satoshi Nakamoto read Mises, and Bitcoin is the embodiment of true market money in digital form.”
Satoshi, like Prometheus, brought Bitcoin to mankind. We can now reclaim a free market. But without the Austrian school we will not manage it.
Could bots start talking to each other and push people to the sidelines?
Briefly: They already do, but without people there is no point.
Stepan Gershuni (e/acc): By conversing among themselves, bots can produce better answers. But without people they lose their raison d’être.
Artificial intelligence does not imply desire as such. What is desire? It is fear of death. Living organisms can die. An immortal digital entity has no such fear, nor a desire to reproduce.
A machine uprising is a scenario fit for Hollywood or science fiction. It is unlikely even after AGI and advanced robots.
AI, just like Bitcoin and Ethereum, exists only as long as it does something useful for people. If the first cryptocurrency stops being needed, no one will mine it. Blocks will stop being produced and Bitcoin will die. The same will happen to AI.
Yevgeny Romanenko: Bots and artificial intelligence are forms of capital goods that exist because they have users. Ignorance of economic theory allows apocalyptic forecasts. The Austrian school brings one back to reality.
What is a programmable economy?
Briefly: Automating and optimising tasks with technology.
Stepan Gershuni: The programmable economy is simply a philosophical or futurist view of technology and its significance.
Since the first civilisations we have been moving towards automation: it is a more efficient way to produce economic goods.
In the 20th century society focused on scaling production. Now efficiency is delivered by networks — Bitcoin, Ethereum and other cryptocurrencies, AI, neural and social.
Coordination costs are falling. Production used to cluster around giant factories. Now you can work remotely and get paid in various currencies, because the infrastructure exists.
“The programmable economy is a gradual shift towards automating and optimising tasks and meeting diverse needs. The most effective way to build that future, to me, is P2P structures: DAOs, the network state, and decentralised AI.”
An entity like OpenAI (Google or Facebook) that decides how we should live will be replaced by personal assistants with access to personal data.
The most important task for humanity in the coming years is to decentralise artificial intelligence. If we do not solve it now, we will not be able to in future.
A few organisations will concentrate AI in their hands. They will have too much power and resources. You will not be able to roll that back.
What are meme coins for?
Briefly: To test ideas.
Stepan Gershuni: The industry has found clear product-market fit where crypto works. That includes staking, decentralised exchanges and everything DeFi. It is a multi-billion-dollar market with a large number of users.
Meme coins, GameFi and RWA are hot topics, yet it is unclear whether they have real utility. In my view, this is a market of memetics. A meme is just an idea, a kind of noosphere.
Crypto is a financial market created in the noosphere — a market of ideas. If people believe in them, they buy tokens. Some even make money on it.
“It’s not about making money. The market reflects interest in a decentralised way; it is a signalling tool. The blockchain shows what people find interesting. It helps quantify — to turn the noosphere, the realm of ideas and memes — into real billions of dollars.”
Meme coins are a fundamentally serious thing. Though if you are not a professional trader and you trade them, you will most likely lose everything.
Do AI tokens have real value?
Briefly: Conceptually — yes; economically — no.
Stepan Gershuni: AI tokens are meme coins. In my view, projects like Bittensor, Fetch.ai and SingularityNET do not work.
In Bittensor the economics are broken: they issue $20 million daily, but there is little real value in that. Fetch.ai has no users. SingularityNET is built around its founder Ben Goertzel.
Bitcoin has a product and an economy. On Ethereum you launch rollups and AMM. The capitalisations of these cryptocurrencies are underpinned by real cash flows and the value they generate.
Decentralising AI is important, but in 95% of cases you do not need a token for it. AI can operate in a distributed system with payments in USDT or bitcoin.
The projects listed are not interesting for long-term investing. However, Bittensor has very powerful ideas. The project created something like OpenAI in the open. Perhaps the team will make changes or other developers will implement it better.
What highs should be expected in this bull cycle?
Financial-market forecasts are the private opinions of their authors. The following analysis does not constitute trading advice.
Briefly: From $150,000.
Tone Vays (analyst, trader): I am looking for at least $150,000. We have roughly a year.
ATH I expect somewhere between April and September 2025. I think in this cycle digital gold will deliver the best result — from $150,000 to $200,000. Above $500,000 is unlikely.
As I see it, now is a very good time to enter bitcoin.
Will DeFi set a new all-time high in total value locked (TVL)?
Briefly: Certainly.
Alex Shevchenko (Aurora Labs): The fundamental reason for the current bull market is capital inflows into the industry via ETFs launched in the US. They settle not only in the major cryptocurrencies, but also in DeFi applications.
Another major narrative today is the tokenisation of all sorts of assets: real estate, shares of private companies and others. If that happens, markets will form around them. TVL will grow accordingly.
What is Chain Abstraction?
Briefly: Creating a key to which accounts on different blockchains can be bound.
Alex Shevchenko: This is a unique technology promoted by Near. A smart contract on the Near network creates a key and stores it off-chain. The key is distributed among the network’s validators. They can reconstruct it and sign a transaction only jointly.
You can bind to the key accounts on blockchains that support standard cryptography such as secp256k1 and Ed25519. These include Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, Sui, Aptos and many others.
The technology has many interesting applications. For instance, we have always assumed that to transfer tokens between networks you need a bridge. Chain Abstraction offers another solution.
For example, Alice has bitcoin, Bob has Ethereum, and they want to swap assets. Alice generates an account in Near, then asks the smart contract to create a bitcoin wallet and transfers coins to it. Bob does the same with Ethereum.
After that Alice and Bob can swap Near accounts using Account Abstraction, which allows for key rotation. The trade occurs without moving bitcoins and ether on their native networks.
Thanks to this you can swap assets within slow Bitcoin and expensive Ethereum by passing accounts between different people. Chain abstraction sets a new trend I would call AccountFi.
The technology is under development. Follow the project that will soon be announced under the name Diffuse.
Which altcoins to buy?
Financial-market forecasts are the private opinions of their authors. The following analysis does not constitute trading advice.
Briefly: Near (NEAR), Solana (SOL), Cosmos (ATOM), The Graph (GRT), Biconomy (BICO), Chainlink (LINK).
Vladimir Cohen (crypto trader): I can say for sure: Solana and Near are strong companies that will not rug and will survive.
Solana grew on meme coins: the experiment of releasing the Saga smartphone was successful. The company works well with institutions: last year Ethereum received ten times less investment from big investors.
Near has strong founders and large funds that have invested a lot of money in the project.
Cosmos (ATOM) is fundamentally good; The Graph (GRT) is undervalued. Biconomy (BICO) is number one in Account Abstraction, which few people know about. But will they rise? That depends on marketing.
Chainlink (LINK) is a must-have.
What’s the difference between bitcoin at $1 and at $100,000?
Briefly: The number of people talking about it.
Vladimir Cohen: Three billion more people will hear about bitcoin at $100,000. A fever will set in, as in 2017 and 2021, because all the major media will again report on a new record.
That is when the big players will close their positions. It is a psychological level many traders and investors are waiting for.