From the very first moments of the documentary, Jackson sets the tone.
Crypto “doesn’t make sense.” Some coins rise 1,000%, others do nothing, and violent swings appear out of nowhere. But this unpredictability isn’t chaos — it’s the symptom of a mathematical structure completely different from the one most people assume.
In normal life, everything clusters neatly around an average. Height, temperature, test scores — they all form bell curves.
Crypto doesn’t.
Crypto lives in a world where extremes aren’t rare — they’re expected.
Jackson introduces a crucial distinction.
The real world operates under additive randomness, where extremes are almost impossible. Nobody is five times the average height, just like nobody has twenty times the average IQ.
But crypto lives in the opposite environment — compounding randomness. Upside is unlimited; downside is capped at zero.
This creates a world where:
It’s the mathematical birthplace of Bitcoin-like outcomes — where gains stack on top of gains, compounding along branching paths that look chaotic at first, but reveal a deeply patterned structure when viewed through the right lens.
To help us see the invisible architecture beneath markets, Jackson introduces the power law.
When plotted visually — whether for wealth distribution, city populations, or YouTube views — a distinct shape emerges: a tiny cluster of outsized winners, followed by a very long tail of everything else.
Crypto behaves exactly the same way.
A handful of assets dominate the entire market. Most coins will never matter, no matter how much hype surrounds them.
Jackson frames this with a vivid analogy: if Elon Musk walks into a pub, one extreme outlier destroys the meaning of “average.”
That’s what an outlier crypto asset does to an entire portfolio.
Most people build their portfolios as though crypto were a normal market — diversifying evenly across many assets. But in a power-law environment, this guarantees underperformance.
Because:
Crypto rewards concentrated exposure to the right hubs, not equal exposure across everything.
Jackson shifts perspective dramatically: stop looking at crypto as prices on a chart, and instead look at it as a network of nodes and connections.
Every blockchain, every exchange, every person, every stablecoin is a “dot,” and every interaction is a “line.”
Very quickly, the network reveals that connections don’t spread evenly.
New nodes attach to already connected nodes — in the same way airlines connect new routes to major hubs like Heathrow or JFK.
This phenomenon, known as preferential attachment, produces scale-free networks — structures dominated by a few supernodes and countless minor ones.
This is why:
They became hubs — and hubs attract more connections.
Jackson then explains something profound — crypto’s violent crashes follow the same mathematics as avalanches and wildfires.
As a system grows denser (more leverage, more liquidity concentration, more interconnected entities), it becomes increasingly unstable. One small spark can trigger a cascade.
This is why:
Crypto naturally drifts toward the “critical state,” where both explosive upside and catastrophic downside become inevitable characteristics — not anomalies.
Jackson proposes a simple three-part evaluation framework that reveals whether an asset is a network “hub” or just a replaceable node:
When Jackson ran his Inevitable Portfolio through these criteria, the result aligned perfectly with power-law theory: a few dominant hubs earned the majority of weighting; everything else became a long tail.
The takeaway is simple:
Don’t force diversification in a system that punishes diversification.
Concentrate where the network concentrates.
Jackson shows that a portfolio built for a scale-free environment doesn’t just pick the right assets — it weights them correctly:
Most people invert this — overweighting weak, replaceable tokens and underweighting the network supernodes that control the majority of value.
A power-law portfolio flips this on its head.
Jackson ends the documentary with a simple, powerful message:
You don’t need to predict the future.
You only need to understand how the system works.
The new financial system — built on CBDCs, tokenization, AI-routed liquidity, stablecoin rails, and interoperability layers — is taking form right now. The hubs are already emerging. The connections are being made. The cascades are inevitable.
Those who align themselves early with the right nodes benefit from the network effect. Those who diversify blindly into the long tail do not.
If you want the full story — including simulations, visualizations, and Jackson’s evolving real-time portfolio — watch the documentary on The Macro.
It’s required viewing for anyone serious about understanding the architecture of the new financial system.
