In Awe and Contemplation of “The Cryptopians”
This is a review of Laura Shin’s “The Cryptopians: Idealism, Greed, Lies, and the Making of the First Big Cryptocurrency Craze” (2022)
In this neuro-electric joyride tale of humanity awakening soon after the technological birth of Bitcoin, Laura entertains us with a mesh of personalities and events which illuminate the crazies in the first crypto craze. I chose the audiobook version of this cryptographic history of the Ethereum Foundation because of my enjoyment of Laura’s podcast voice over the years. By now I can tune into her hidden smiles and other subtle emotions, such as spectral seriousness, which adds layers of entertainment to sometimes deeply complex and technical crypto-ecosystem content. For example, I had fun listening to Laura give voice to the letters and numbers of public hashes which form the chain of evidence linking the people in the story to timestamped events on distributed, decentralized ledgers.
Moreover, I had a moving and nerdy good time while journeying through this action-packed, sentient and richly investigative account which seems to unravel the identities of both bad actors and sheer brilliance in the drama of billions. Hopefully this factual narrative serves as a calling to the significance of holistic mental health within the lifecycles of decentralized technologies. Not hearing the medium in the message may come at our own peril.
If the “first craze” timeline was Web3 elementary school then we must be in junior high now, learning about family, friendship, community and collaborating for public good.
Overall I was glad to hear of so many vissisitudes and mental health challenges among the founders of the crypto craze because my general assumption had until that point been that these are all angelic beings collaborating in happiness, bliss and thriving abundance.
However, in the same manner I am disappointed that I had failed to join the Ethereum Foundation, mistaking that no response over my CVs meant they were all professionally more competent. Laura’s research makes it apparent that they were winging it and I could have easily fit in when I was applying with my family life on the line.
After digesting “The Cryptopians”, I am left to wonder about the balance of bad actors within humanity going from darkness to brightness, or ignorance to awareness, and the possibility of a thriving and sustainable presence of organic life on Earth.
It seems that if we continue to tolerate and glorify the destructive nature of severe, covert, malicious and destructive mental disorders of the dark tetrad in positions of governance and responsibility where life on the planet is at stake, then we do so at our peril.
While I remain entertained with the woven stories of facts from this first big “craze”, I do hope that the right awareness and attunement continues to be the foundation for these mentioned emerging technologies. That would be in agreement with the original open-sourced Bitcoin blockchain disclosure. Otherwise I see no future if the tools are used for nuclear warfare instead.
One technological vulnerability often emerged in these tales: why did so many cypherpunks use Skype to chat about private business matters during the developmet of technologies such as the ethereum blockchain? Skype is owned by Microsoft, whose products are all monitored by the National Security Agency (NSA), a national-level intelligence agency of the United States Department of Defence, which means that every bit of data such as voice and text outside of standard tunnel vision is flagged and monitored.
The NSA would have seen bleeps on their radars about everything at great depth before the craze, during the craze and after the craze.
1) If the NSA knew about the founding psychologies and technologies of the Ethereum Foundation, what did they do with this insight?
2) If the NSA did not know about the Ethereum Foundation, why not?
The growing interconnected minds in the continued workings of Ethereum today have the power to transform international business. They went right through top security agencies perhaps because it is the consensus of the crazies that make a craze! Only crazies are off radar because deep fuzzy logic is not a competence of today’s artificial intelligence.
Buy the book or audiobook on Amazon using my referral code in the link:
“The Cryptopians: Idealism, Greed, Lies, and the Making of the First Big Cryptocurrency Craze”
