About

Eat Sleep Crypto is a long-running set of notes on tokenomics, economic security, and the political economy of money. It started in 2017, in the lead-up to the ICO mania, and has run through every cycle since.

The writing is reasoned from first principles. Markets cycle; mechanisms recur; the questions that matter compound. The goal is to think in frameworks that survive cycles, not to chase narratives that don't.

What's here

Essays span five threads:

• Tokenomics — the principles, levers, and leverage of designing tokens that capture value.
• Economic Security — the incentives that hold protocols together, and the mechanisms by which they fail.
• Cypherpunk — censorship-resistance as the only 10x value proposition of blockchains, and what that implies for what gets built.
• Valuation — applying the equation of exchange to cryptocurrencies, identifying price floors, separating fundamental value from speculative premium.
• Culture — the social and political dynamics of crypto: subculture death spirals, narrative capture, the four-year clock.

The oldest essays date to 2018; the newest are recent. Use the category filters on the essays page to jump in wherever's relevant.

About Nate

Nate has worked on tokenomics, mechanism design, and economic security since 2018. He runs Token Dynamics — a protocol design and economic audit firm — and is co-founder of punk.fun, a fair-launch token platform built for cypherpunks and builders.

Find him on X at @satorinakamoto.

Mission

Crypto's only enduring value proposition is censorship-resistance. Everything else is downstream of that, and everything that isn't will eventually be done better by traditional finance.

ESC is for the builders who are still here for the original thesis — building from first principles, reasoning from incentives, designing for the next century, not just the next cycle.