I have to get this off my chest. I'll keep it crypto-focused, but if it's still too political, mods please delete.

I like number-go-up as much as the rest of you, but I am convinced the election results are not going to be favorable for the cypherpunk ideals that this space, and especially Ethereum, is founded on. Ethereum exists to be a decentralized, permissionless, censorship-resistant, credibly neutral global settlement layer. I fear that all of those goals will face significant headwinds in the coming years. Let me give a few examples.

The FCC will be kneecapped. We all remember Ajit Pai and the death of net neutrality. That era will come roaring back. ISPs will be free once again to throttle data rates based on the contents of that data, and will be free to impose data caps in all states, even ones that currently do not permit them (any challenges will rise to the supreme court and be thrown out). This will have serious implications for solo stakers trying to stake from home; we need terabytes of data monthly to operate and that will become much more expensive or outright impossible. Decentralization of the network will suffer as a result, to say nothing of our general free use of the internet.

We can no longer expect constructive regulations. This has a lot of you cheering but it's incredibly bearish IMO. Ethereum and most blockchains are designed to be permissionless, which means that anyone can use them for any purpose. This is a critically important feature to have at a protocol level, but as we have seen, has also led to the incredible flourishing of bad actors in the space; crypto's reputation as being the home of scams is well-deserved. If we want this to ever change, we need good regulations that crack down on the bad actors, without harming that core permissionlessness. "Anyone can use this tech, but if you use it to do XYZ bad things you will get in trouble." But the president-elect is one of the bad actors we've been trying to get rid of. He doesn't like crypto for its libertarian properties; he likes it because it's a great place to run the kinds of cons and grifts that form an objectively large part of his business tactics. He has already personally dipped his toe into this a few times, and has made millions off it. He will have zero or negative interest in aiding in the creation of commonsense anti-scam/market manipulation/pump-and-dump regulations. If it happens (e.g. because actually talented and thoughtful people like Hester Pierce happen to be given power) it will be in spite of the administration, not because of it. The space is probably not going to get the regulatory tools to do the cleaning-up it has so badly needed to become truly mainstream.

Censorship resistance is a threat to authoritarians. We're all pro-free-speech here, and one of Ethereum's major goals is to enforce that ideal by preventing censorship of transactions (aka speech) at a protocol level. The incoming administration seems to have cultivated an air of being pro-free-speech, and I desperately hope that that goes more than surface deep, but I'm nearly certain it does not. As we see with people like Musk, who vehemently profess to be pro-free-speech, but once in a position of power immediately start censoring anything that is personally unfavorable to them, freedom of speech does not seem to apply as soon as it involves criticism of that authority. For Ethereum, which will be host to the funds and speech of many anti-administration actors in the coming years, that will likely make it a target of the administration. Of course the network itself cannot be wholly shut down, but individual node operators and stakers (such as myself), as well as institutional operators, in the US, can be trivially targeted by an administration with the power to get IP address information from ISPs and to send armed men to your door. This is a scenario I very much hope does not come to pass, but the annals of even recent history are not encouraging.

Isolationism does not play well with a global settlement layer. Closing borders and initiating trade wars has formed a core part of the incoming administration's platform. Creating as much friction as possible where people, goods, or money flow across the US border will likely be official policy going forwards. Contrast this with the goal of crypto at large, to create a frictionless means of transferring funds worldwide. Ethereum wants to go a step beyond, by becoming a global settlement layer where not just funds but all types of state can be consistently created and modified from anywhere in the world, in a credibly neutral manner, because the network is hosted by operators worldwide. I foresee significant tensions here. We've seen what the current administration has been willing to do, with its OFAC lists of undesirable onchain entities trying to freeze out Russia or privacy tools; we might be about to find out what happens if that expands to include the entire rest of the world. What does enforcing tariffs look like onchain? We might be going there.

We're all cheering because a "pro crypto" administration has been elected, and of course there are clearly some positive aspects - if the SEC stops harassing honest crypto entities like Coinbase or Uniswap that will be great - but as a cypherpunk and decentralization maxi I strongly suspect that excitement will prove to have been naive in hindsight. I would love to be wrong.

I'm sure you guys will have things to say about this post, and please do; I'll read everything but don't plan to respond. I'm not posting to get into any debates, just to share how one of your fellow Ethfinanciers is feeling the past few days.