All of crypto follows these basic principles - a guide to ignoring 99% of shilling dogshit tokens

I see a huge difference between most advanced / "real" crypto communities on Farcaster, Twitter etc. and Reddit. Mostly, reddit is filled with shillers for shitty projects that will "revolutionize" the industry and flip Bitcoin or Ethereum. Here is a short guide on how to value different chains and ignore 99% of shilling:

All blockchains (except L2s) can be valued along the 3 facets below

Blockchain economic game

• Does the new chain your idiot friend is shilling have a economic game underlying the chain being perpetuated? This is the most fundamental incentive to driving adoption. Blockchains first and foremost are pieces of software that perpetuate themselves by incentivizing monkeys (us) to replicate them for economic value.
  • If yes, who can play the game (produce blocks)? Is it permissionless or permissioned? If latter, its dogshit.
  • Does this game determine/involve consensus of the chain? If yes, great, if no, its a sidecar and there is no reason for it.
• Does this economic game use a native base asset of the chain?
  • If yes, great, if not, its a sidecar and there is no reason for the base asset to exist.
• Does value accrue to this base asset (does the chain's economic game contribute value to the token)?
  • If yes, great, if no, there is no reason for the asset or chain to exist because no one wants to hold the asset or play the game long term.

Lindy

• How long has the chain been alive, with the value on chain largely uncompromised via attacks on the integrity of the chain's economic game?
  • The higher this number the better.
• How much value has been on the chain, multiplied/integrated over time span above, available for people to try and steal via attacks on the integrity of the chain's economic game?
  • The higher this number the better

Utility: These are numbered/sorted according to importance:

1. How many people in the world would trade currency or value in other forms for the base asset of the chain? (How much liquidity is there on a daily basis around the world)?
   1. If under $100 million a day, its effectively zero.
2. Can you use the native asset permissionless-ly to send value?
   1. If not, the chain is useless.
3. How many people in the world are playing the economic game in first section (produce blocks)? How concentrated is the game? (who holds the most of the asset, does it matter who holds most of the native asset according to the rules of the economic game of the chain?)
   1. If under 1,000 its effectively zero.
4. Does the chain have enough expressivity to do things other than send the base asset, like verify proofs?
   1. If yes, great, then it can actually scale, if not, value will always be capped by the native asset. Not always a bad thing.
5. How much do people pay to use the chain? Is the value bigger than the cost of paying the players of the economic game in first bullet for a given time period (day, week, year)?
6. How much economic activity does (not can) the chain handle? (Volume)
   1. If under $5 million a day, its effectively zero.
7. How much activity can the chain handle? (Observed average size of transaction * TPS)

Notice that no where in this is "how cool does the technology and whitepaper sound", and TPS is only involved in one facet, as the least important factor. Asking all of these questions to any new shill is a way to avoid wasting brain cycles/space on thinking about some new shitcoin someone is peddling. It also explains why most of the value in the industry is in capitalizing the top few chains (Bitcoin, Ethereum). Solana may be the only other one to qualify, but has very high state growth, economic costs of consensus and state growth. Celestia is another new one that may have a bright future after at least 3-5 years of proving itself.

All other coins are effectively trash and you can invest in them later safely if they ever prove themselves by achieving some metrics above (e.g. >$100 million/day in global liquidity), while still having more than enough upside to "make it". This is my personal rubric after having spent 12 years in crypto as a professional validator and miner.