AI and immense tech wealth are becoming a lightning rod for populist anger from both political parties. The right is fracturing its alliance with tech over censorship concerns, while the left is turning on tech for its perceived alignment with the right, setting up a challenging political environment.

Maja Vujinovic posits that Gary Gensler, despite his pro-crypto past, was strategically positioned by banks to slow innovation. This regulatory friction gave traditional financial institutions the necessary time to understand the technology and formulate their own digital asset strategies before competing.

Boomers control traditional, low-volatility assets (housing, stocks, bonds), making it impossible for younger generations to catch up via conventional means. High-volatility frontier assets like crypto represent the only viable path to meaningful wealth creation, transforming crypto into a critical political issue for attracting younger voters.

The industry is transitioning from adolescence to early adulthood. It's gaining serious attention from financial institutions ('the adults') but still faces significant development and regulatory challenges before reaching full maturity, much like a teenager on the cusp of legal adulthood.

The traditional left-right political axis is obsolete. A better framework is the 'political horseshoe,' which captures the generational conflict where younger people, facing a future of deglobalization and AI job displacement, are forming new coalitions outside the established consensus upheld by older generations.

Recent election results reveal two distinct Americas defined by age. Younger voters are overwhelmingly rejecting the political establishment, feeling that policies created by and for older generations have left them with a diminished version of the country. This generational gap now supersedes many traditional political alignments.

The biggest barrier to crypto adoption is the cognitive effort required to build new mental models for concepts like cryptographic security and decentralized ledgers. This process is slow and generational, much like the early internet, advancing "one funeral at a time."

The adoption of superior technologies like cryptocurrency is often hindered by the entrenched power of incumbents like banks and regulators. The ultimate victory for crypto may not come from winning arguments, but from a generational shift as older, resistant leaders pass away.

To overcome executive skepticism, HP's Bilal Kouider reframes blockchain not as a niche crypto trend but as the result of 40+ years of innovation originating from 1970s academic research. He points to its current scale—processing over $28 trillion annually, more than Visa, Mastercard, and Amex combined—to establish its enterprise-grade credibility.