Why I deeply love crypto/Web3

The shallowest and dumbest article I have recently read was by some computer science professor about why he thinks “all crypto should burn in hell.”

I won’t bother linking to it, he didn’t say anything new. But this morning I was wondering about why that article pissed me off. And I realized that the reason is that I really love, respect, admire and feel gratitude for the crypto/Web3 community.

This article explores that emotion.

First — why focus on the emotional side?

Crypto/Web3 is at core a techno-socio-political movement that reflects a set of beliefs about how humanity should govern itself. What this means is that we have to act like such a movement, and share in emotional terms why we support it.

That is how we build greater support for it from the rest of society that might not appreciate the nuances of technology or finance behind it. Emotional communication will help us build the movement.

So, without further ado — why I love crypto and Web3.

1. I am deeply grateful that someone is building technologies explicitly designed to prevent tyranny

So much Western press in recent years talks about how different parts of the world are descending into tyranny. And some are even starting to realize that it can easily happen here.

Yet what the press is utterly failing to appreciate is that the way to prevent tyranny is to make it extremely difficult, ideally impossible. That is the reason the Founding Fathers instituted a right to bear arms. Because small arms were power, and a distributed technology against tyranny.

Today, money is power. And for many decades, governments — including the so-far-democratic Western governments — have been trying to assert ever-greater centralized control of it. Because that’s what powerful systems do, strive for more power. Even though this behavior contains within them the seed of destroying the original values on which they were founded.

We need to develop technologies and movements that make it difficult-to-impossible for governmental systems to engage in tyrannical activity. And I have love, admiration, respect and gratitude to the crypto/Web3 community for building technologies that increase the chances of our society being free.

2. I love that it is really, usefully, helping real people every day in a huge number of ways

With the Russia-Ukraine conflict, I have seen how individuals on all sides rapidly used crypto to solve their objectives. NFT sales and crypto donations for Ukraine. Capital control avoidance in Russia. Getting money to live in countries that refuse to open bank accounts for people who fled Putin after Feb 24. Suddenly all my friends became crypto users.

The reason for crypto is obvious. There are a bunch of ossified systems all over the place. And they make up new rules without understanding the complexity of the consequences. Russia saying “if you send money to anyone in Ukraine you’re a terrorist.” England (tried) to say “if you have a Russian passport you must not have more than 50k pounds in your bank account.” This shit affects real people who are just trying to help their relatives or move to a safer place in the world!

So what crypto does is it allows an escape valve, a way for people to achieve their goals in the face of lumbering, inhumane monolithic systems that don’t know who they are stepping on in their blind rampage. It helps real people every day when they are in trouble.

Those that say crypto is useless because they can’t use it to pay for a burger will dance to a different tune the day they run up against the system and feel Moloch on their own skin.

And I have love, admiration, respect and gratitude to the crypto/Web3 community for building technologies that already help many of us in this uncertain world.

3. I love that crypto/Web3 is one of the communities that embody the spirit of creativity and innovation

We want to have more people of the Elon Musk kind. Who can reimagine things that do not work well, and rebuild them in a better way. And the crypto ecosystem is creating a huge number of such people because they are seeing a very large sector of society — money — being remade at an extremely rapid rate. These people will then go and apply this thinking to other sectors and apply rapid innovation and iteration there.

Innovation and creativity is inherently chaotic, unpredictable, unstable, experimental, dangerous and disruptive. And today’s human society is conservative and obsessively focused on stability, certainty and safety. Might be all these old people in power. The point is that the mainstream is very actively opposed to innovation.

I for one don’t want to live in some boring future that is pretty much like the present. I want my immortality, brain-computer interfaces, metaverse sensoria and space travel. And for that, innovation and creativity have to flourish and be free of the mainstream. Plus innovative people have to be rewarded with wealth that they will then direct to further innovation.

So I have love, admiration, respect and gratitude to the crypto/Web3 community for being one of the centers of flourishing and freedom of innovation and creativity in human society. Crypto/Web3 is the modern-day Florence/Venice.

Join the revolution

Right now, crypto/Web3 is going through a downturn along with the rest of tech.

Amusingly enough its opponents think this might kill it when it will actually become stronger. The reason is that crypto/web3 is a dynamic and vibrant community many of whom are in it for philosophical and emotional reasons of the kind I describe above for myself. A downturn will kick out the posers and galvanize the core believers and make it easier for new highly aligned co-conspirators to enter.

And we will be back far more powerful a few years from now. Because this is a movement that is in opposition to conservatism and tyranny which many of us humans are fed up with.

If this resonates with you, join the revolution. Crypto is where the cool people who are not happy with the state of the world are congregating today. I for one am looking for interesting opportunity to integrate crypto/Web3 in everything I do — both for philosophical reasons and because it is useful.

And let’s look for more ways to explain in emotional and passionate terms why we are in this movement. It will help us find new co-conspirators and help us have greater impact in the world.