A Year in Review: 2025 Reflections and 2026 Thinking

Each year around this time, I like to look back and see where my head was at the year before. It’s humbling to see what you got right and what you got wrong, but it’s also incredibly useful for shaping how you think about the year ahead. If you’re building things, having a record of how your thinking evolves over time is valuable — which is why I like to write posts like this and keep the habit going.

Reflecting on My 2025 Predictions

Looking back on predictions is always humbling. Some landed. Some missed badly. A few were directionally right but off on timing or magnitude. Below are my original 2025 predictions, followed by how they actually played out from my perspective.

Bitcoin’s Performance

Bitcoin will have a good year, but not better than 2024. For it to beat 2024, it must close above $206k on December 31, 2025. I’ll take the under on that. I’m not ruling out it being over that at some point in 2025.

This one was certainly off. We did hit new all-time highs, but nowhere near what many expected. The year didn’t end on a bullish note at all — we saw a sizable pullback, and today we’re sitting around ~$88k. So while Bitcoin had a “good” year in absolute terms, it didn’t come close to validating the more aggressive upside narratives.

Though price didn’t move like I expected, that doesn’t mean there wasn’t substantial progress. I wrote about that here.

Twitter’s Success Continues to Stunt Nostr

Nostr adoption will stay slow due to Elon’s dominant influence with X (Twitter). As long as it remains a beacon of free speech, I doubt we will see an exodus.

This one was correct — even in my own behavior. I rarely check Nostr. Twitter is still where the conversations actually happen. That doesn’t mean Twitter is perfect. The algorithm and feature changes were frustrating at times, but overall it held its ground.

I also mentioned Rumble integrating Tether wallets and potentially adding Nostr-like features (zaps). That hasn’t really materialized yet. Only a beta went live in early December, so it’s too early to judge. Maybe 2026 tells a different story, but as of now, there’s nothing meaningful there.

Apple

Apple will continue its rent-seeking behavior and put out underwhelming products.

This one feels right. Apple did essentially nothing in 2025. Yes, they released another iPhone — I think it was orange — but there was no real innovation. Siri remains laughably bad in a world where ChatGPT, Grok, and even Gemini are orders of magnitude more capable. Apple continues to extract value without pushing the frontier forward.

Google’s Quantum & AI

The recent buzz about Google’s quantum chip and AI improvements won’t pan out as a big deal. Google will continue to trail OpenAI and xAI in practical LLM usage.

On quantum specifically, I still think this is a nothingburger — at least for now. Quantum hype showed up again toward the end of the year, and some people even blamed Bitcoin’s pullback on quantum fears. I don’t buy it. I think we’re at least a decade away from quantum being something worth worrying about.

On AI, this one is more mixed. Google is still behind in my own usage. I almost never use Google search anymore. Brave Search works when I need links. ChatGPT is my default for research. Grok is my default for what’s happening right now.

That said, a lot of people seem impressed with the latest Gemini releases, so I wouldn’t call this prediction fully correct — just correct for me. YouTube remains the one Google product I still use constantly.

Elon, Vivek & DOGE

I expect them to deliver more than critics think. They’ll expose bloat and inefficiencies in ways that will shake up norms. I wouldn’t bet against them.

This was the most wrong I could have been.

Vivek was out before the end of January. Elon was gone by around May. DOGE accomplished essentially nothing. Elon himself openly voiced that the Deep State won. And honestly, it looks like it did.

This was the most disheartening outcome of the year. The entire effort failed, and it reinforced a hard truth: the only real way out of institutional rot is innovation, not reform from within.

Mainstream Media Reckoning

In Trump’s second term, mainstream news outlets will face an honest reckoning. They’ll have to reduce their bias or risk bankruptcy.

This didn’t happen in any dramatic way. What we saw instead was more of the same slow walk toward irrelevance.

There were interesting shifts — Barry Weiss taking over CBS, legacy media assets getting scooped up by newer players, Netflix circling traditional studios. But there was no sharp reckoning.

Independent media continues to grow. Substack keeps expanding. YouTube and podcasts are now fully synonymous with how people consume news. This wasn’t a collapse — just continued decay.

RFK Delivers

We will see significant changes in the health space due to RFK at HHS.

Progress here has been modest, but I still think RFK is the brightest spot in the current administration. He’s faced serious resistance, but he is pushing in the right direction. I like what he’s trying to do, even if the pace has been slower than I hoped. I’m cautiously optimistic this compounds over time.

Foreign Policy

With the transition to Trump, I expect foreign policy wins that will buck the establishment and deliver outcomes not thought possible by “experts.”

This was very wrong.

Trump did not quickly exit Ukraine, which I fully expected. His actions in Venezuela have been deeply frustrating. The hoped-for shift toward focusing inward toward problems at home simply didn’t materialize.

Once again, it feels like the Deep State co-opted the agenda. On foreign policy in particular, Trump looks far more constrained than I anticipated.

Closing Thoughts

If there’s a theme here, it’s this: institutions rarely reform themselves. Whether it’s media, government, or big tech, change mostly comes from being replaced — not fixed.

Some predictions missed on timing. Some underestimated inertia. And a few were just wrong. But reflecting on them reinforces what I believe more strongly than ever: the future belongs to builders, not bureaucrats.

General 2025 Thoughts

Bitcoin, Spam, and the Mempool Debate

2025 was a big year for debate around spam filtration and transaction filtering on the Bitcoin network.

I still run a knots node, and watching the discourse unfold was honestly disheartening. There were disingenuous arguments on both sides—especially around what constitutes “spam,” how mempools work in practice, and the idea that node operators can simply default their own mempool policies to solve everything.

In theory, nodes having control over their own mempools is true. In practice, pretending this cleanly solves spam or abuse without tradeoffs felt misleading. The conversation often ignored real-world incentives and coordination effects.

That said, I remain optimistic that none of these debates will meaningfully harm Bitcoin in the long run. Bitcoin has a strong immune system. Still, I don’t love the direction of making non-monetary transactions easier or more normalized on the base layer. Even if technically permissible, I think it muddies Bitcoin’s core purpose in ways that aren’t obviously worth the cost.

Quantum: Overhyped, For Now

Quantum fear made another round this year, and I continue to think it’s largely over-exaggerated—at least in any practical, near-term sense.

We’re still very far away from meaningful, productized quantum capabilities that pose an immediate threat to Bitcoin or modern cryptography more broadly. Most of the discourse felt speculative, abstract, and disconnected from actual timelines.

It’s something worth tracking. It’s not something worth panicking over.

Lightning Network Momentum

One of the more encouraging developments this year was continued progress on the Lightning Network—especially driven by Lightspark.

I’m genuinely optimistic about what Lightspark is building and hopeful for their success. Payments need to be fast, global, low-cost, and—critically—private.

I don’t believe chains like Solana, Ethereum, Base, or other corporate-controlled chains are sufficiently private or decentralized to serve as the foundation for the next generation of payments. Lightning, despite its complexity, still feels far closer to what that future actually demands.

AI as a Baseline, Not a Bonus

AI crossed an important threshold this year: it became synonymous with workload.

At this point, AI is no longer optional in my work process—it’s table stakes. The people embracing it are compounding their advantage, while those avoiding it out of fear are quietly falling behind.

This isn’t about replacement. It’s about leverage.

AI is now a must-have tool, and the gap between those who integrate it deeply into how they think and work—and those who don’t—is only widening.

Books I Read in 2025

• Wind and Truth — Brandon Sanderson
• Zero to One — Peter Thiel (re-read)
• The Cold Start Problem — Andrew Chen
• Creative Selection — Ken Kocienda
• The Laws of UX — Jon Yablonski
• Traction — Gabriel Weinberg & Justin Mares
• Monetizing Innovation — Madhavan Ramanujam & Georg Tacke
• The Mom Test — Rob Fitzpatrick
• The Founder's Dilemma — Noam Wasserman
• A Little Hatred — Joe Abercrombie
• Launch — Jeff Walker
• Hyperion — Dan Simmons
• The Fall of Hyperion — Dan Simmons
• Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind — Al Ries & Jack Trout
• Shōgun (Part Two) — James Clavell (currently reading)
• The Lean Startup — Eric Ries (just started)

The Biggest Takeaway’s

Looking back, the vast majority of the value this year came from a small handful of books — and only one of them was a re-read.

Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind

This was the standout book of the year by a wide margin.

It was genuinely life-changing. More than any other book I read this year, Positioning reshaped how I think about products, markets, and what is actually worth building. It clarified that success isn’t about features or even execution — it’s about owning a clear position in the customer’s mind.

If I had to pick one book that most influenced my thinking this year, it’s this one. No contest.

The Cold Start Problem

From a product perspective, this was probably number two.

Understanding network effects — how they form, how they stall, and how they compound — directly influenced real decisions I made this year. This book helped put language and structure around patterns I’d seen before but hadn’t fully articulated.

It’s especially valuable if you’re building anything where distribution and adoption matter more than features.

Hyperion & The Fall of Hyperion

These were the most impactful fiction reads of the year.

What stood out wasn’t just the quality of the writing, but how different their view of the future felt compared to the standard AI-driven dystopian narratives. So much modern fiction feeds on itself and reinforces pessimistic, fatalistic views of technology.

Hyperion did the opposite.

It presented a future that was complex, strange, and even unsettling at times — but not hopeless. It pulled me out of the reflexive “AI doom loop” and got me thinking more optimistically, and more creatively, about what the future could actually look like.

Other Notable Mentions

• The Mom Test was short, practical, and very grounded in reality.
• Creative Selection didn’t change my behavior so much as reinforce it — sprinting to demos, learning by showing, and letting reality do the talking.
• Monetizing Innovation was a strong read on pricing and value capture, and one I’ll probably revisit.

A Note on Brandon Sanderson

I finished Wind and Truth, but it was easily my least favorite book in the Stormlight Archive.

It felt bloated, less authentic, and far more catered to modern sensibilities than earlier entries. There was a lot of fluff, and very little of what made the series special in the first place. Book two is still the high-water mark for me.

I’ll keep reading — I like Sanderson — but I really hope he gets back to his roots.

2026 Predictions

Bitcoin: The Four-Year Cycle Is Over

I think the idea that Bitcoin is still governed by a clean four-year cycle is outdated.

The assumption that we are now “in a bear market” feels early and increasingly wrong. Institutional participation has changed the structure of the market. Blow-off tops and violent drawdowns appear to be getting dampened as more capital treats Bitcoin as a long-term asset rather than a speculative trade.

Because of that, I do think we see new all-time highs in 2026.

Gold and silver had massive runs in 2025, and I view that less as a coincidence and more as a signal. You can interpret it two ways:

• Bitcoin ran first (from ~$20k to ~$100k), then gold and silver followed, or
• Gold and silver are front-running the next Bitcoin move.

My guess is somewhere in the middle. I don’t expect a face-melting run, but I do think new highs are very much on the table. Institutional money seems to be smoothing both the upside and the downside — fewer blow-off tops, fewer brutal crashes.

I do however predict that Bitcoin will outperform gold in 2026 which is a contrarian take right now. Gold definitely won that battle in 2025 but I don’t expect it’ll that to continue for too much longer

U.S. Politics: Midterms as the Inflection Point

If Trump doesn’t shift course and start prioritizing domestic issues — especially those core to his MAGA base — I think Republicans get smoked in the midterms.

If that happens, it will severely limit his presidency and embolden the same institutional forces that have already constrained him.

If, however, he does pivot — focusing inward, distancing himself from neocon foreign policy instincts — and Republicans hold or improve their position in Congress, that would materially change the trajectory of his administration.

Right now, this feels like a fork in the road.

Europe Continues Its Populist Drift

I don’t think Europe snaps overnight, but I do think the trend continues.

• Germany: AfD continues to gain ground.
• France: Marine Le Pen’s party keeps growing, lawfare or not.
• UK: Reform continues to pull votes from the traditional parties.

That said, I still expect Brussels and the broader EU bureaucracy to override voter sentiment in the near term. The EU increasingly functions as a technocracy rather than a genuinely democratic system, and that tension isn’t resolving itself yet.

This looks less like a revolution and more like a slow, unmistakable shift — one that becomes harder to ignore with each election cycle.

If EU leadership continues to clamp down on these populist movements, I expect U.S. detachment from Europe to accelerate — and frankly, that may be a good thing.

The EU’s increasing hostility toward free speech and its willingness to undermine democratic outcomes runs directly counter to core American values. Add to that the fanatical, open-ended commitment to Ukraine — even in the face of diminishing odds, mounting economic damage, and a clear lack of humility about the possibility of losing — and the divergence becomes obvious.

In that scenario, I don’t see a renewed Atlantic alliance. I see a growing fracture, driven less by ideology and more by Europe’s unwillingness to confront its own limits.

Stablecoins: Growth Continues, Cracks Start to Show

I think stablecoins continue to have a strong year in 2026.

Coming off the GENIUS Act, they’re clearly primed for further adoption. The demand is real, the use cases are obvious, and the momentum is there. Stablecoins are one of the few areas in crypto that feel undeniably product–market fit.

That said, I think we’re starting to get a bit ahead of our skis.

I don’t believe chains like Solana or Ethereum are actually ready for true mass adoption — especially when it comes to privacy, and frankly, basic auditing functionality. At a small scale, a lot of things work. At a global scale, those tradeoffs become painfully obvious.

I’m also skeptical that corporate or permissioned chains — things like ARK or Tempo-style models — end up being the long-term winners here. They may serve short-term institutional needs, but they feel more like transitional infrastructure than end states.

My hope is that new approaches emerge — potentially something built on top of Bitcoin, like Spark on a Layer 2 — but I don’t expect anything truly transformative to be live and widely adopted by the end of 2026.

What I do expect is for weaknesses to start to show themselves. Privacy limitations, scalability tradeoffs, and governance constraints are likely to surface as stablecoin usage continues to grow.

So yes — good year overall. But also a year where the limits of today’s architectures become harder to ignore.