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My Thoughts about @Stacks right now

1/ Stacks SIP (PoX) review: STX is now heading toward permanent issuance

The core of this proposal is restoring the block reward permanently to 1,000 STX.

Originally Stacks was designed to taper off (1,000 → 500 → 250 → 125 → 72.5 …), eventually approaching a near-zero issuance asset, but going forward it becomes a coin carrying roughly 3% annual inflation.

The stated rationale is that to keep paying yield to native BTC stakers, the STX mining reward has to stay at least at some minimum floor, and this change is meant to sustain that.

The positive case:
Under this change, BTC bidding to mine the 1,000 STX issued each block continues, PoX yield keeps getting paid out, and BTC holders can earn stable yield on the Stacks network.

The pitch is roughly: "Stake native BTC at ~3% for two years and you recoup the equivalent of a 5% STX position; keep it locked for additional yield; issuance keeps flowing, so the incentive to stake is more than enough."

Looking at staking difficulty and several other angles, I do think Stacks has become the most stable and rational model among protocols currently generating yield on BTC.

If that rationality spreads through the market and large numbers of institutional and retail BTC holders take up native STX staking, they keep locking STX supply, and a scenario where the STX price rises in proportion is plausible.

That said, with only 1,000 STX per block, even if, say, 100,000 BTC flowed in, a coinbase reward at that level isn't sustainable against it.

A perpetual virtuous cycle is unrealistic; the upward momentum holds only up to some roughly fixed cap.
(And given they've already changed this 3–4 times in two years, who's to say they won't just bump the coinbase reward again when the time comes?)

So in the good case, Stacks establishes itself as the flagship of BTC yield: institutions buy at least ~5% STX against their BTC principal and start by staking it, buy-side demand is sufficient, and a lot of supply gets locked up in staking. A genuinely positive scenario.

2/ The negative case:
My problem is that this entire discussion centers on BTC stakers, with the existing $STX holders left out completely.

It amounts to: "Eventually~ once BTC staking activates the network~ the native BTC stakers will surely use the STX network too~", and to me it just looks like lavishing rewards on native BTC stakers up front.

As it stands, the model pays interest to people for merely holding native BTC in their own wallet. Nothing changes for actual network users.

At a minimum that capital should be put into LPs, or at least show up as TVL to grow the network's weight, but it does neither.

They talk about liquid staking tokens eventually emerging on top of this, injecting liquidity through them, and capital that profited here later allocating into the STX network. But if so, they should bring that along, or at least show there's a team building it.

As designed, no matter how I look at it, only institutional BTC holders free-ride on the 3%, and they can spit it back out once they've drained the honey.

Institutions get taken care of; existing holders get neglected. That's how it feels.

For this reason, I've concluded there's no need to hold STX outright, and exposure of just ~5% against BTC is the right call. It's become a coin you don't need to buy much of.

3/ Separately, I think the foundation is being somewhat deliberately misleading.

Claiming the additional issuance is "less than 1% of daily volume". When you unpack it, this is a coin that now inflates ~3% a year, yet they want the focus only on "blocks switch to 1,000 STX now."

Pointing out that the top-50 crypto average inflation is 15.9% so theirs is "low" (saying nothing about how, as an earlier launch, they've already paid out that much in rewards).

Don't they even claim that STX-only stackers aren't worse off, that yields could actually go higher without BTC stakers? (As if that's how it'll play out.)

They keep rewriting the tokenomics to suit themselves while only pretending to gather input.

Dual stacking was originally the existing STX holders' own share, now simply handed to BTC stakers, and that too quietly slips by.

They say they're "gathering your feedback" while not actually even looking at the negative opinions.

I think the foundation's drive to deliver value to $STX holders has all but vanished, and I stopped adding to my position a long time ago.

My tentative conclusion is that the Stacks entity barely thinks about STX value and treats STX as a money-printing press for BTC holders.

The right move is to become a BTC holder and hold just enough STX to do dual stacking. Stacks-based alts can't even make it onto exchanges under the SIP-10 standard right now, so how exactly is BTC-L2 going to take over the world?

And as I've said repeatedly, the Stacks side seems to want to keep only the positive shillers and basically won't engage with anyone who says anything negative.
I've raised my voice a few times too, and since they don't seem inclined to listen, I've half given up.

4/ Conclusion
My main investment thesis now: the scenario of "once BTC dominates the world someday, its flagship L2 STX network gets hugely active and accrues value!" is all but gone.
Instead, STX has shifted in character to a BTC-yield printing press that sits beside Bitcoin: "When BTC hits $1B, everyone who wants yield on it has to buy ~5% STX, and the price rises in proportion!"

(And if the network ultimately fails to activate, the end of this yield game will just be revealed as churning out mud cookies.)

So there's no need to go all-in on STX in a portfolio. It's become an asset to play with at just ~5% against BTC, maybe 10% if you're really greedy.

The truly bullish case is that everyone rushes to BTC-stake, more BTC than Stacks' entire market cap flows in, everyone tries to lock 5%, and a supply shock hits.

(Though in that case, since you only need a small amount of STX to qualify for the 5% yield condition, supply actually loosens back into the market.)

One way or another, it's become an asset that moves in proportion to Bitcoin's market cap, just with a somewhat larger swing.

But if that's the case, rather than holding STX (which keeps getting minted) through that volatility risk, you may as well just hold Bitcoin, and keep just ~5% in Stacks to collect yield.

My original investment thesis was, "Wow, if that rock-like Bitcoin becomes a usable network, what would that be worth?" The path it's on now has diverged a long way from that.

Finally, I'll attach a Muneeb tweet. Unlike my view, Muneeb thinks that when the next bull cycle comes, BTC goes 3–4x and Stacks, as a Bitcoin bond, could go 20–50x.

I think @muneeb should have spoken up like this much sooner.
If you're going to add to STX, the time to do it is when voices reframing STX as a Bitcoin-protocol bond start drawing market attention again. Until then, ~5% against BTC is the ideal portfolio weight.

If you already hold a lot of STX, or you're thinking about entering fresh, I hope you'll chew over my view one more time. (Not investment advice, of course.)