If you’re confused by Crypto, don’t feel bad– it’s arguably the most confusing subject in the world.
Why?
Uncertainty
Crypto is a radical experiment that is playing out in real-time. No one can tell you the outcome. Very smart people about where the whole project is going.
Pace of Change
The space is changing at lightning speed. It would be a full time job to keep up with the sheer pace of innovation. Criticisms can be invalidated; experiments can fail; doubtful ideas can defy critics and prove successful; narratives can suddenly collapse; new projects can gain traction and change things overnight.
Narrative Overload
You will hear a cacophony of wildly different framings for what the whole purpose of crypto is. There are a thousand competing narrative framings. Depending on who you talk to, you may hear all about:
- Technological innovation — improving payment and settlement technologies
- Disrupting banks and financial intermediaries
- The end of the fiat experiment and a return to “hard money”
- Hedging against inflation
- The separation of money from state
- Self-sovereignty, libertarianism, freedom
- Banking the unbanked
- etc.
Multiple Disciplines
Crypto is inherently multidisciplinary. Relevant fields include cryptography, engineering, finance, trading, macroeconomics, regulatory law, monetary history… and many more. It has also spawned entirely new subfields, like the study of crypto-economic incentive structures (tokenomics).
There are no professors or recognized world experts on the subject of Crypto. It’s too new for that. Everyone is taking bits and pieces of some prior training in a properly organized field and figuring this out as we go.
Tribalism
Holding a token makes you part of a community, a tribe. This inevitably influences your thinking — you will find that you start looking at a token more favorably once you have some upside exposure to it. This is the magic of economic incentive alignment — the tribe that owns a token now naturally feels impelled to go evangelize it. But you need to be cognizant of this powerful cognitive bias.
You will regularly encounter extreme partisans of particular tokens that will downplay or denigrate everything else and present their favored asset as the endpoint that the whole narrative was building towards.
Misinformation
Critics of Crypto often point out that it is full of fraud and scams, and they are pretty much right. There’s a wide spectrum of false or misleading information you may receive, ranging from bots sending you phishing links in Discord & Telegram, to dishonest devs that rug-pull, to well-meaning folks that just give you incorrect information.
Approachability
Ironically, the apparent approachability of Crypto helps add to the confusion, because people think they get it, including people who will proceed to tell you complete nonsense.
Crypto should not immediately make sense. A natural reaction should be one of extreme skepticism. It should take a lot of work before it starts to make sense; for basically every smart person I know, it took many hours of study for them to overcome their initial skepticism. If it somehow seems easy, you are probably someone who is gullible & easily misled. (See the “IQ Bell Curve Effect” discussion in this article: Why the Yuppie Elite Dismiss Bitcoin).
As a result, you will find a weird mix of very smart people and very dumb people in Crypto. It’s the “middlebrows,” who are not dumb, but haven’t yet put in the work, who will struggle the most.
Should you give up?
Combine all this, and you are left with possibly the most hostile and confusing learning environment for newcomers to a subject, ever. But stick with it, anon. It’s worth it.
