You should get into blockchain because it’s real life Calvinball
There are no rules and everything is a joke until it’s real
In the world of cryptocurrency, everything is a joke until it’s real and all of a sudden ForbesCrypto is writing about it in full seriousness.
Exhibit A? Blockchain-for-religion, invented by a self-professed atheist, who seems to think that all that religions need to solve their problems (Corruption! Inconsistent theology! Persecution! Outdated beliefs!) is a little decentralization.
I’m not joking. Michael Del Castillo, a fantastic reporter who I’ve been following for the past three years when he used to work at my old company, American City Business Journals, just wrote a feature on Matt Liston, a big name in crypto, and the guy who is launching a religion inspired by and governed by the ethereum blockchain.
Ok, HOLD UP. Before we talk about how insane the idea of blockchain-for-religion is (and I’ve got serious questions but mostly I just can’t stop groaning at the absurdity), we need to talk about what the heck blockchain is and why I know anything about it, because I know most of my regular readers are about to tune out.
First off, I’m not a blockchain expert. I’ve only been actively researching blockchain for at most six months. And I started researching it ENTIRELY because of FOMO (Mom, that means fear of missing out). Now, in blockchain circles, FOMO has its own association with buying popular cryptocurrencies because they’re surging in value. I had a tiny bit of interest in investing in Bitcoin, because it seemed like a smart thing to do, but I was way more motivated by wanting to make sure I didn’t miss out on being one of the people who could influence the future of the next big thing.
I keep meeting these O.G. (Mom, that stands for Original Gangster but is almost always used ironically to just mean early adopter of anything) freelancers who started making websites before most people had an email address, or figured out advertising on Facebook before everyone was doing it, and they were able to make a lot of money and became quite influential in the world of digital marketing. And as a digital marketing freelancer today, it sometimes feels like I missed the boat on everything and I’m having to play catch-up.
Blockchain is still young enough that I thought maybe I could be involved and actually be one of those grizzled O.G.’s that future generations look up to. Yeah, it started almost 10 years ago, but it’s still a long way from mainstream adoption.
But my road to getting involved with blockchain has NOT been smooth. If you haven’t figured this out already, you don’t just google, “What is blockchain,” read for 10 minutes, and then walk away confidently understanding blockchain.
It’s stupidly complicated and hard to wrap your head around. And I choose that word deliberately, because it’s actually stupid how high the barrier to entry is in all things blockchain. It shouldn’t be. At all.
As in, morally, we should never make the barrier to entry to something as powerful and compelling and profitable as blockchain WILL be so high that entire sectors of the population see no path for themselves to get involved.
And practically speaking, you DON’T need to understand the technicalities behind blockchain to be meaningfully involved in its development. At least, not at first.
What makes it hard to explain is that there haven’t been many real-world applications of the technology yet. When you look up “what is blockchain” the answer goes like this:
“Well, it’s the technology behind Bitcoin, which you’ve probably heard of, but now I’m going to launch into a lot of detail about stuff you have no interest in like applied cryptography and skyscraper-level math and use weird examples like hundreds of prisoners in solitary confinement solving math problems together to help you understand it.”
They do that because there aren’t any other real-world examples that you’d be familiar with to point to.
If you had Googled “what is the Internet” back in 1991 (I know I know, you couldn’t have because Google wasn’t created until 1998 and it didn’t enter the Oxford English Dictionary as a verb until 2006), you would have gotten a similarly dense and tedious definition. Now if someone says “what is the internet?” you can say “You know, Facebook, Google — it’s the way the world instantaneously transfers information.”
Eventually, we should be able to answer the question “what is blockchain” with similar simplicity:
“You know, blockchain, it’s the way the world transfers digital property.”
My girlfriend has suffered through many a conversation about blockchain in the last six months. But until the last few conversations, she hasn’t had a lot of interest.
“Is it just too complicated and not something you want to devote mental energy to wrapping your head around?” I asked her. She’s in her fourth year of vet school. She doesn’t have a lot of extra mental energy or capacity for information.
“It’s not so much that it’s complicated, it just seems so tedious,” she said.
Boom. She nailed it.
Blockchain enthusiasts aren’t doing a good enough job articulating why blockchain is so fun and crazy when they talk to outsiders. Because when they start talking about it, it sounds so damn tedious.
I want to change that. In the next few weeks, I hope to release a series of posts explaining my take on the most interesting concepts of blockchain, the exciting applications, the huge flaws and roadblocks to mainstream adoption — and I hope to do it all with the humor and honesty and vulnerability you all know me for.
Because it’s important to be clear on this: The information overload is not the only barrier to entry in blockchain. There’s also a huge social barrier. If you don’t think of yourself as technical, you probably don’t see a place for your ideas or input in blockchain. If you don’t hang out with technerds and techbros, you may not have even really heard of blockchain. And if you’re not a white male, if you start trying to get into blockchain, you will very likely be turned off by what you find in the community (and plenty of white dudes would also be turned off).
The online chat rooms — whether you’re on Facebook, Reddit, or BitCoinTalk.org — are full of sexist, ableist douchebags talking about day trading and using insider jargon and sharing Dave Chappelle memes. I have no idea how Chappelle got roped into it. It’s so hard to find a meaningful community to discuss the cool and fun parts of blockchain, where you can go at it with someone as one of you takes the perspective that blockchain-for-religion is brilliant, and the other says, “I hope the earth gets swallowed up in a lake of fire before anyone actually seriously considers that!”
Which brings me back to the latest proof that the world of blockchain is Calvinball in real life. Calvinball, from Bill Watterson’s Calvin and Hobbes cartoon, is a game where the rules are made up on the fly, and the only rule is you can’t make the same rule twice.
In the world of blockchain, so far, we’ve seen:
- A parody coin called Dogecoin (Mom, “doge” is a popular way of spelling and pronouncing dog that started with a Shiba Inu meme), which hit a peak valuation of $2 billion. 2 BILLION DOLLARS. People spent that on a joke.
- The digital equivalent of the Beanie Baby craze, when CryptoKitties were invented to be bred and traded as collectibles, with some selling for more than $100,000.
- A bunch of other weird memes-turned-crypto-projects that I don’t even entirely get.
- And NOW, a new blockchain-based religion.
The main concept at the core of all of the serious applications of blockchain is decentralization. (The concept at the core of the joke coins is usually taking an idea to the logical extreme to prove a point, to break something, to scam people, or just to have fun.)
Decentralization would give everyone in a system equal rights, equal access, equal information, and equal power to manipulate the system. It aims to remove corruption from systems where the parties in a transaction have strong incentives to cheat, so they rely on a trusted third party to make sure neither of them does. A decentralized system would find a way to remove the third party by creating a system where neither party in the transaction has an incentive to cheat anymore, by creating an uneditable, completely transparent record of every transaction. (It gets a lot more complicated than that, but you don’t need to worry about that yet.)
It’s very utopian in concept. In execution, it mostly doesn’t work…yet. But there are a lot of projects that are on the cusp of creating something truly revolutionary.
For religion, sure, there are some obvious problems related to corruption, lack of transparency, and governance. Religious leaders do have an uncomfortable amount of power, both political and social. There are disputes about what is Truth, and how sections of whatever holy text a religion is based on should be interpreted in the modern age. Members of a religion don’t always get to decide where the money they contribute should go (look at mega-church pastors who live in McMansions).
Liston’s project attempts to address these issues with blockchain, but I can’t really tell if he’s serious or just trolling religion, since he is, after all, an atheist.
But are those really the biggest concerns with religion? Religions have been the breeding ground for sexual abuse cover-ups and victim-blaming and the justification for hate crimes and oppression for centuries. If you want to fix religion, you have to address those issues before you worry about the issues Liston wants to solve.
Maybe I’m wrong, maybe the power of decentralization could help with making humans more accountable in a religious setting. I’d be happy to debate the point, however, my goal here was to give you a taste for the wild and wonderful world that blockchain is turning into.
In the future, I hope to explore the following blockchain-related topics:
- Blockchain and Inclusivity: How blockchain development consistently ignores the concept of “nothing about us without us.”
- The role of the free press in a decentralized world, who will serve that role, and what it will look like.
- Criminal justice, sentencing, prisons and rehabilitation vs. blockchain — does blockchain play any role in that realm?
- Can blockchain make humans better? (more trustworthy or act for the greater good?)
And so many more!
If you have a liberal arts degree, and you thought blockchain was too complicated for you, consider this your invitation to the table. We need you and your critical thinking skills. Without you, we’re probably going to end up with more joke coins, more dictators trying to abuse blockchain, and more Silicon-Valley bros rehashing colonization by oh-so-benevolently bringing blockchain to third-world countries in order to make millions.
And if you can intelligently talk, write, or think about blockchain, you can make a lot of money right now.
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