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🤩 Erik Voorhees: Bitcoin is the most powerful financial tool ever created by humans.

1. Bitcoin and Ethereum.

• ETH and BTC have achieved an almost indestructible network effect.
• Ethereum is the "king of smart contracts," and there is no scenario where it loses its leadership.
• Base will become the dominant L2 on top of Ethereum.
• L2 usability is weak, but the ecosystem still wins thanks to network effects.

2. Why he believed in Bitcoin.

• Bitcoin solved a fundamental problem: government control over money → distorted markets.
• Gold cannot be protected from governments because it is physical.
• Bitcoin is a rare, market-driven, mathematically secured asset with no physical limitation.
• Voorhees’s first reaction to BTC: “sounds like a scam.” But after 30 minutes he realized, “this is the best financial technology I’ve ever seen.”

3. The future: Bitcoin as world money.

• BTC will become the dominant monetary asset on the planet.
• Gold won’t be wiped out, but it will lose its role as the foundation of the global financial system.
• The change will happen after a government debt market crash—a reset of the financial system is inevitable.
• Timeframe: about 5-15 years.

4. Financial collapse.

• People in the Western world have never seen a real collapse—it will be a “horrific and defining event of the era.”
• The danger is that after the crash, people will try to solve problems with the same methods that created them.

5. The main idea—separation of money and state.

• This is the core meaning of Bitcoin’s existence.
• Bitcoin didn’t ask anyone’s permission—it organically earned its place in society.
• Money is a far more important institution than religion, and the state should not control it.

6. On governments buying BTC.

• Financially, it’s good for BTC holders, but philosophically it’s bad.
• Governments are the worst custodians of capital.
• Voorhees prefers Bitcoin to be held by private individuals and companies.

7. Crypto and the state: “It’s gross, but inevitable.”

• Lobbying and meeting with politicians is unpleasant but inevitable in today’s reality.
• The problem isn’t crypto, it’s the size of the state.
• If Bitcoin becomes the global standard, states will inevitably shrink economically, as they won’t be able to devalue the currency.

8. SEC and regulation.

• The worst period of the SEC was under Gary Gensler.
• The regulator is better now.
• He respects Hester Peirce as “the only light” in the dark years.

9. Prediction markets.

• Prediction markets are cool.
• Augur was too early. Polymarket is an example of successful growth.
• “Sufficient decentralization” is important—not a binary concept, but a set of criteria.

10. DAO

• DAOs are not a perfect model, but an experimental form of coordination.
• Making a DAO a “commune” without hierarchy is a mistake.
• DAOs need leaders and structure, or they fail.
• ShapeShift DAO achieved its goal—the app lives on without a corporation.

11. AI + tokens.

• The world is moving toward tokenization of all financial assets.
• AI will manage the economy, and tokens will become the accounting system.
• Crypto was “made for machines” from the start—AI is perfect at handling cryptography.

Erik Voorhees is one of the earliest Bitcoin maximalists, founder of ShapeShift, and one of the key ideologists of the movement for the separation of money and state.