"Cyberpunk currency," why do I continue to hold ETH?

Written by: _gabrielShapir0

Translated by: AididiaoJP, Foresight News

Thoughts on ETH

Lately, I’ve been seriously contemplating ETH—why do I hold it? Do I want to keep holding it? Why do I believe it has value?

From friends and colleagues, I’ve heard three main perspectives on ETH:

“Bitcoin +” — A store of value against currency devaluation, but “better” because:

It can deflate when needed, inflate when necessary

It has native programmability, usable without relying on third parties

“System equity” — ETH is like a stock in a decentralized computing platform: more users → higher demand for block space → higher fees + more ETH burned → greater scarcity

“Digital oil” — A commodity view between the first two

These perspectives are not mutually exclusive; they are just different angles of viewing the same thing.

My view relates to these, but with a slight difference: ETH is a cyberpunk currency, and cyberpunk is reflected in the current environment.

Cyberpunk vs. Cyberpunk: Why this distinction matters now

In works like “Neuromancer” and “Cyberpunk 2077,” currency is less a moral concept and more a “routing tool”: credit chains, corporate accounts, street cash, human relationships—value flows through channels that are not fully monitored by systems. Those with real influence are the ones who can still complete transactions under pressure.

“Money” is everywhere, but the key question is: when big corporate systems turn against you, can you still trade? Authentication, access, executing transactions, exiting the market—all boil down to one question: can your transactions still be confirmed, settled, and recognized as valid?

That’s the correct perspective for understanding Ethereum.

ETH is not narrowly “cryptopunk currency” (like ZCash, focused on privacy). It is a cyberpunk currency: in a world that is both adversarial and interdependent, it’s an anonymous credential.

There’s a common misconception in crypto: a false dichotomy—either you build liberating tech against institutions or you build enterprise infrastructure, which is “betraying the ideal.” Reality is more complex and interesting:

Large companies are building and using crypto rails—they’re already doing it

Crypto pathways bypass rigidity, exploitation, and censorship

Cyberpunks are a product of cryptography: privacy, anonymity, secure communication, resisting centralization with mathematical tools. They largely exclude “corporate actors,” because companies are reluctant to trade in fully unregulated spaces.

Cyberpunk, on the other hand, is broader and more inclusive: hacking systems within institutional boundaries—blending tech, law, finance, identity, social engineering. Here, style is strategy, rules are written in code and contracts. Companies can operate here because compliance, execution, and accountability are possible, but “outlaws” can also exist—making cyberpunk a universe where all participants can freely interact, connect, and subvert.

Ethereum’s positioning is here: building protocols that enable conflicting institutions to operate together, while preserving true exit rights and property rights for anyone who can sign and pay. Using ETH as currency in this “future city” is cyberpunk.

ETH as a cyberpunk currency

The value proposition of ETH as “currency” is often simplified into a “digital gold” narrative, trying to persuade Bitcoin holders and gold enthusiasts. But they are already fully convinced of BTC or gold and won’t switch to ETH.

BTC and gold themselves do not “carry” anything—they are memecoins, hedges against fiat inflation and central bank-driven social philosophies. Personally, I believe that in the new deflationary normal brought by AI and robotics, this hedge will become less relevant.

The vision of ETH as a cyberpunk currency is grander and more immediately appealing because ETH always transmits exercisable “system rights” within the Ethereum network. ETH is tightly bound to smart contract environments, enabling “trustless” commerce, which sustains its value even in a deflationary environment because:

It has real economic fundamentals backing its value

In an increasingly extreme, tech-dominated society, both enterprises and individuals need an “economic autonomous zone”

ETH’s fundamentals

Under proof-of-stake, ETH is not just a “representative” of value; it’s a resource used to buy the ability to have your transactions executed, included in the blockchain, and participate in consensus:

With Ethereum’s upgrade to Hegota, paying validators ETH at current market rates guarantees your transaction will be included and executed in a block

32 ETH plus consumer-grade hardware can activate a validator to propose/attest blocks and (roughly) vote on protocol upgrades

These network powers within the protocol are ETH’s fundamentals. In practice, they are enforced by explicit state transition functions and penalty mechanisms.

This is also why PoS better supports a cyberpunk currency than PoW:

ETH grants native protocol participation rights: staking is a threshold, and staked assets can be penalized or slashed

BTC relies on belief-based scarcity and durability; mining requires specialized ASIC hardware, which has no intrinsic link to ownership, and transaction inclusion is basically a bribe market without protocol-level guarantees

A deeper difference: negative contracts. Because staked assets can be slashed and ASICs cannot, PoS chains can protocolize bans:

You cannot “equivocate” on chain splits without penalty

You cannot be offline too long without penalty

You cannot censor without penalty

A true social contract includes both “what to do” and “what not to do.” PoS can encode both with enforcement; PoW mainly encodes “what to do,” hoping economic incentives work as intended. Just look at the Bitcoin community’s debate over BIP-101, where they discuss punishing miners including “spam.”

ETH can be a good currency because its monetary properties are not based on “fixed supply” Ponzi economics or Lindy effects, but on systemic “property rights”: the ability to buy execution/inclusion “system rights,” participate in the “system,” and be recognized as a first-class citizen in the core protocol—all reflected in ETH.

Ethereum’s value cycle: Utility → Security → Trustless Neutrality → More Utility

Ethereum operates in a cycle that is both economic and constitutional:

Exercisable rights → Broad participation: low hardware barriers and permissionless staking enable security through widespread participation

Participation → Usage and demand: trustless settlement attracts developers, users, high-value use cases, and demand for execution (fees, collateral, settlement)

Usage → Fees: the system prices scarce block resources in ETH

Fees → Validator rewards + Burn: fees go to validators; high usage tightens supply via fee burns

Rewards + Burn → ETH demand: ETH becomes an asset linked to yields and security, with scarcity increasing as usage grows

ETH demand/price → Network security: PoS security is proportional to staking value and destruction costs

Security → Trustless neutrality: the harder consensus is to break, the more credible the rule enforcement

Trustless neutrality → Value and complex logic migration: important assets and serious contracts flow to the hardest-to-attack settlement layer, feeding back into usage

If any link breaks, the entire argument weakens. Ethereum’s design ensures these links remain tightly connected within a true circular economy.

Maintaining trustless neutrality in a corporate-dominated world

This is the turning point for cyberpunk: you should expect powerful institutions—exchanges, brokers, payment giants, rollup operators, custodians, even governments and quasi-government entities—to emerge. They will build rails, optimize incentives, sometimes coordinate, sometimes coerce, sometimes coerce others.

The question isn’t “Will enterprises use Ethereum?”—they already are. The real question is:

Can any company—or alliance of companies—tilt the system to place everyone else in a structurally subordinate position?

This is what “trustless neutrality” in a cyberpunk framework is actually doing. It’s not about moral purity but engineering constraints:

A trustless neutral base layer is interoperable against adversarial participants

Without trustless neutrality, the strongest players will ultimately prevail through policy, censorship, or subtle market structures

Ultimately, this points to blockchain’s superpower: greatly increasing societal scalability.

Ethereum becomes the only real “no special channels” economic zone, enabling counterparties to engage in large-scale commerce with low trust and minimal legal recourse.

Inclusion and censorship resistance: the cornerstone of digital property rights

Property requires enforceable rights. If you “own” an asset but cannot transfer, exit, collateralize, or release it under pressure, you don’t truly own it.

On blockchain, this enforcement boils down to:

Can you get a transaction included within a limited time if you’re willing to pay the settlement price?

That’s why censorship resistance is key to property rights. It’s also why Ethereum research continually pushes to strengthen inclusion guarantees under adverse conditions—like FOCIL (fork choice with enforced inclusion), explicitly reducing potential censorship freedom.

Speed alone doesn’t solve censorship. The key variables are:

Distribution of block production power

Protocol incentives/penalties

Explicit inclusion mechanisms when needed

If enterprise stacks can blacklist you at the settlement layer, then this “currency” is fake. ETH’s valuation depends on Ethereum making such blacklisting structurally difficult.

Ethereum as a programmable legal foundation: a powerful computational public domain

A useful mental model: think of Ethereum as a programmable legal foundation—a reliable computational commons even when participants are adversarial.

This introduces a new set of institutional primitives:

Deploying code that represents or enforces protocols, markets, registries, rights

Promising to follow protocol rules rather than platform operator preferences

In other words: making commitments that are harder to break than those of ordinary institutions, even if the breacher is wealthy, experienced, and willing to litigate forever.

You pay for this execution with system-native assets: ETH.

ETH is a cyberpunk currency because it’s a blend of:

Computational credit

Performance collateral

Member credentials in a neutral jurisdiction

The importance of the cyberpunk framework lies in the fact that we are building not an “infinite garden,” but a boundary layer between old and new systems, where law and code mesh like mismatched gears. Ethereum’s advantage is its resistance to change, making it a foundational shared infrastructure.

L2 scaling: don’t let the plot derail

Rollups are necessary. A roadmap centered on rollups is rational: keep L1 slow enough to maintain decentralization and verifiability, and scale execution via L2 that inherits L1’s security.

But the cyberpunk risk is clear: L2s could become corporate fiefdoms:

Centralized sequencers could censor or reorder transactions at the user level

Token economics could shift value away from ETH

Alternative data availability solutions could reduce economic coupling with L1

Therefore, future ETH-supported rollups should:

Require L2 activity to pay settlement/data fees to L1 proportionally to usage (so ETH burns/revenue stay coupled with adoption)

Ensure L2 neutrality converges over time toward L1 neutrality (decentralized sequencers, trusted exits, minimal governance attack surface)

Maintain ETH as a gravitational asset—fees, collateral, staking, inevitable exchange paths

If L2s keep economic coupling and inherit neutrality, they benefit ETH. Otherwise, they become fragmentation engines: lots of activity, value drained, guarantees weakened.

In cyberpunk terms: enterprise complexes can exist—but they must not quietly override the settlement constitution.

Tokenized assets: crypto-native assets and the blockchain theater

Tokenization only truly strengthens ETH’s narrative when it becomes crypto-native property, not a token IOU with admin keys and termination clauses.

The boundary is simple:

Is the chain’s state transition function itself an authoritative transfer mechanism (or a trigger that traditional institutions must follow)?

Or is the token merely a UI pointer to an off-chain registry that can be ignored when inconvenient?

If Ethereum is to become a key settlement layer for important assets, it needs:

On-chain events that are considered decisive (or at least presumptively authoritative)

Execution minimized to objective cryptographic standards

Human/legal interventions that are narrow, explicit, and handle exceptions—not routine discretionary control

Ethereum’s inclusion guarantees again come into play. The validity of tokenized rights depends on your ability to exercise them under pressure. We need cyberpunk tokenization protocols on Ethereum.

Conclusion: ETH as a cyberpunk currency

Crypto punk has given crypto its moral core: privacy, autonomy, resistance. But Ethereum’s constructed stage is cyberpunk: corporations and new powers coexist on the same track, opposing yet interdependent, each creatively wielding technology, each trying to tilt the system.

In that world, currency is not just a store of value. It is:

An execution credential

A settlement resource

A security tool

A property enforcement primitive

So, “ETH as a cyberpunk currency” ultimately hinges on a constitutional argument: if Ethereum maintains trustless neutrality, trustless inclusion, and remains economically coupled with its layer-2 extensions, then ETH’s value is not just because people believe in it.

Its value lies in being the only scarce credential in the entire tech stack that neither corporations nor new powers can control.