While international markets have more volatility and lower trust, their biggest advantage is inefficiency. Many basic services are underdeveloped, creating enormous 'low-hanging fruit' opportunities. Providing a great, reliable service in a market where few things work well can create immense and durable value.

Speculation is often maligned as mere gambling, but it is a critical component for price discovery, liquidity, and risk transfer in any healthy financial market. Without speculators, markets would be inefficient. Prediction markets are an explicit tool to harness this power for accurate forecasting.

While consumer fintech gets the hype, the most systematically important opportunities lie in building 'utility services' that connect existing institutions. These complex, non-sexy infrastructure plays—like deposit networks—enable the entire ecosystem to function more efficiently, creating a deep moat by becoming critical financial market plumbing.

Bitcoin's 27% plunge, far exceeding the stock market's dip, shows how high-beta assets react disproportionately to macro uncertainty. When the central bank signals a slowdown due to a "foggy" outlook, investors flee to safety, punishing the riskiest assets the most.

Unlike other tech verticals, fintech platforms cannot claim neutrality and abdicate responsibility for risk. Providing robust consumer protections, like the chargeback process for credit cards, is essential for building the user trust required for mass adoption. Without that trust, there is no incentive for consumers to use the product.

Companies like Tether use "attestations" instead of full audits. An attestation is just a point-in-time snapshot of assets, unlike a comprehensive audit that reviews processes over time. Per Occam's razor, the logical reason for a firm to avoid a proper audit is the high probability of failing it.

The true value of a large cash position isn't its yield but its 'hidden return.' This liquidity provides psychological stability during market downturns, preventing you from becoming a forced seller at the worst possible time. This behavioral insurance can be worth far more than any potential market gains.

For stablecoin companies like Tether seeking legitimacy in the US market, the simplest path is to back their assets with US treasuries. This aligns their interests with the US government, turning a potential adversary into a welcome buyer of national debt, even if it means lower returns compared to riskier assets.

For AI agents to be truly autonomous and valuable, they must participate in the economy. Traditional finance is built for humans. Crypto provides the missing infrastructure: internet-native money, a way for AI to have a verifiable identity, and a trustless system for proving provenance, making it the essential economic network for AI.