Encryption is still a religion

Original title: "The Optimistic Crypto Pitch"

Original author: Matti, Zee Prime Capital

Original translation: 0x26

Editor's note:

The development of cryptocurrency has entered a deep water zone, the importance of cultural and social attributes has been further enhanced, technology can hardly become a real moat, and new terms and narratives have been criticized far more than supported.

Faced with these sudden changes, many veteran players feel uncomfortable and even shout that cryptocurrency is "over." But as community members said, "Belief is the only way out, which is why few people succeed." Matti's article The Optimistic Crypto Pitch explains why you can still believe in cryptocurrency. The following is the full text of the article, which is compiled by Lvdong as follows:

Cryptocurrency has different definitions in the eyes of many people: some think it is a luxury for geeks, some think it is monetary anarchism, and some even call it an absurd scam. Today's crypto industry has moved away from the original libertarian dream and is no longer the small circle of only Satoshi Nakamoto and a few cypherpunk computer scientists. Cryptocurrency has undergone a process of entrepreneurship and has become more ideologically diverse.

In fact, the biggest enemy of cryptocurrency is not those who are skeptical, but those who dare to tamper with the "Bible". Bitcoin supporters don't like Ethereum believers, and Ethereum believers don't like Solana supporters. There is a reason for my exaggeration here. Usually the most intolerant minority is the loudest. But the conflict is obvious - not a fight between insiders and outsiders, but a fight between different currencies.

Talking about conflict doesn't sound optimistic, but it just shows how this subculture imitates religious conflicts in the past (and present). If cryptocurrency is a religion, it is a religion centered on a revolution in money, finance, and commerce. Gods are fungible, narratives are flexible, and financial expectations are scalable. Crypto replaces "we trust in God" with "we trust in our coin."

Optimism

By optimism I mean a person who understands that he has the potential to change the world, and accepts this, drawing strength from his innate nature.

Optimists tend to experiment and take risks for themselves. They love freedom and hate tyranny. But when optimists hate something, they pay the price. They bet right because they know, as Celina wrote: "When people can hate without risk, their stupidity is easily stimulated and the motivation to strengthen hatred will appear by itself."

The optimist does not feel the need to rule on behalf of others, he understands that he will often make mistakes, but still tries. He seizes the opportunity to explore, create and rebuild the world in his own image. The optimist understands that expanding knowledge is the rope of life, allowing his descendants to abandon old ideas and follow new ones.

The optimist understands that resources are not limitations but opportunities, because ideas give resources power and use the environment around them to serve themselves. The optimist accepts change and believes that change is necessary to move forward.

How does this optimism connect to the sales pitch for cryptocurrencies? In the beginning, the deep optimism of a man who could envision a world where governments no longer controlled monetary affairs became the genesis of cryptocurrency.

It’s not because governments are evil, but because they are easily corruptible. And it’s not because people are evil. The longer institutions govern communities, the easier it is for them to hold onto power. After a while, they start looking inward, serving mostly themselves. Why?

Because over time, they become irrelevant, their dogma static, while the world moves on. But they want to survive. They cling to relevance. Suddenly, the world serves them, and they no longer serve the world. To survive, they need to exert more power at the expense of the interests of the communities they govern.

The original cryptocurrency idea, Bitcoin, was about reducing the reliance on power, not on a monopoly of violence, but on immutable code in a network. “A foolish dream.” Yet it worked. This optimistic experiment is now worth trillions of dollars. Today, it’s not just Bitcoin, but much more.

Crypto

The ups and downs of cryptocurrencies are very obvious. The higher they go up, the more painful they come back down. Some laws of nature apply equally to financial markets and the human spirit. Crypto never sleeps, there is always something going on.

Supporters and critics cannot agree on whether meme coins are good or bad, and some succumb to the price volatility. They also cannot reconcile whether VC coins appear on the market at crazy valuations before or after the release of a minimum viable product.

Investors jump from one narrative to another, funding things that either won’t work, can’t work, or even if they do, nobody will use. Most things will go to zero, completely zero. And that’s okay. “Wait, I’m here for the optimistic crypto pitch.”

The medium is the message. Meme coins are a medium, crypto is a medium, human behavior unfolds in new ways driven by new technologies. Going to zero is part of the game.

It doesn’t matter if it goes to zero, because crypto remains the most optimistic technological movement in the world. Every technological and cultural revolution invites exploitation, precisely because it is revolutionary. This opens up opportunities for asymmetric information, which people quickly (mis)use to their own advantage.

But ultimately, in crypto, people are starting to work on problems, trying to solve governance problems (and failing), trying to build a new internet, trusted neutral payment channels, new physical infrastructure for all sorts of interesting use cases, funding research projects that can’t get funded elsewhere, busy monetizing culture, becoming rich before launching a product that’s used by a thousand people, building casinos that become alternative financial products, trying to build new cities and defying death. Much of this is probably misguided. But it shows the great spirit that crypto has to offer.

Crypto is the Wild West meets Las Vegas, it’s a frontier where you can get rich overnight, but it’s more likely you’ll lose it all and get scammed by sex workers. It’s a place where dreams come true, cities are taken, or fortunes are gambled away, and conflicts happen every day.

Pessimists vs. Optimists

For years, I’ve carried around in my head Peter Thiel’s simplified 2x2 framework of optimism vs. pessimism. When you have a hammer (everything looks like a nail to you) Thiel distinguishes between defined and ambiguous pessimism and optimism.

"If you view the future as defined, then it makes sense to understand it in advance and to try to shape it...If you expect an uncertain future ruled by randomness, you give up trying to master it."

The ambiguous pessimist "reacts to events as they occur, hoping that things won't get worse...The ambiguous pessimist has no way of knowing whether the inevitable decline will be fast or slow, catastrophic or gradual. He can only wait for it to happen."

The defined pessimist "is obsessed with the ways things will get worse...thinks that the future is predictable, but since it will be bleak, he must prepare for it."

The

Undefined Optimist sees a better future, but he doesn’t know how to get there. Finally, the Definite Optimist, sees an improved future, so he plans and works to get there. Here’s a simplified version of my Twitter narrative:

I framed politics and technology as the vertical divide between defined and undefined. That’s because politics is not about wealth creation, it’s about governance and distribution. At best, good politics is an enabler of technology and entrepreneurship. But it doesn’t create the future in and of itself. Technology does. It’s the matrix on which society unfolds, the network of information exchange between humans.

The horizontal divide is about the role of the individual vs. the role of the collective. Optimists emphasize the above mentioned foundations. It is more about bottom-up change and robustness through decentralization. Pessimists, on the other hand, see the world as fragile and want to rely on top-down control to maintain it. Only they, through power, can solve the problem before things get worse.

Let’s start with the explicit pessimism of the AI narrative. It is explicit because it relies on a technological paradigm. Why is it pessimistic? At the center of this narrative are machines, as beings greater than humans themselves. It is a new interpretation of God, speaking to mortals through chatbots. Centralized algorithms rule everything. We are at the mercy of this technology.

Either it is the inevitable death brought about by this powerful being, or maybe we can study the Bible of alignment (the principle of alignment). AI as the “interpretation of Abraham (the Supreme Being)” rather than artificial intelligence. Humans become a mere object. There is nothing we can do to stop it, only to submit and hope not to be wiped out by this ferocious force.

As for the unclear pessimists, they are the woke ones. The ones who think that everything has been invented and now we can only redistribute it. At the center of this interpretation is power. Use power to distribute from the strong to the weak. There is no other way, capitalism has failed, we can only freeze humanity and rely on the cold hands of bureaucrats to manage, leaving us in a paper straw-like dilemma (focusing on formal correctness and ignoring practicality and user experience.).

Humanity is the culprit. Nature is the victim. The poor are the victims. The winners are the perpetrators. The only way is that we all lose equally. Only the promotion of superficial diversity and homogeneity of ideas remains, done by those to whom the rules do not fully apply because they are here to save us from original sin. The world is over, stop using energy for progress, because the only progress is miserable equality.

Now for the ambiguous optimists who say “things didn’t work out that way, so we should go back and fix them.” But how? Going backwards is not an option. The path ahead is unknown. Embrace nationalism? Sure, it works for cultural cohesion, but the scale-shifting properties of the patriotic individual can translate into a destruction machine.

The Ambiguous Optimist rejects the homogeneity of globalism and the pointless bureaucratic overburdening, but is confused by the shifting new technological realities. It feels threatened and may tend toward small-mindedness. It doesn’t know how to accept technology as a functional matrix for society.

Ban social media? Is that the same as banning the printing press? The reform has already begun, and suppressing it will ultimately be counterproductive. How to take control of one’s affairs and work toward a concrete future?

The Unequivocal Optimism of Crypto

If you’ve been in crypto for a while, you know it’s a mess. An absolute mess. But the energy of this chaotic, noisy, and misguided technological revolution is due to a strong desire to take control.

It starts with finance, because markets are machines for controlling resources. If we change the structure, we can direct the flow of value to things that the baby boomers didn’t dare to try. They liked the status quo, but crypto doesn’t. It wants change, but it doesn’t rely on just protesting. It’s building. It’s taking risks. It doesn’t want to occupy Wall Street. It wants to liberate it.

Crypto is solarpunk. Crypto is about financial freedom, decentralized cities, and funding scientific experiments. Crypto is the naughty child of disobedience. Naive on the surface, but decentralized, trusted neutral money that is free of corruption and political bias is a major technological revolution. It liberates money. It ignores the politics of panic. Does the tyranny of AML and KYC make the world safer, or the opposite?

Crypto creates a new class of assets that transfer wealth away from the existing generation. Housing becomes unaffordable, so crypto creates new games to bypass the bureaucratic machine that prevents young people from owning anything and advancing. It refuses to "own nothing and be happy." It wants to own everything, even if it makes you miserable. But miserable on your own terms.

Yes, we issue worthless NFTs. Yes, we push overvalued tokens on clueless retail investors. Yes, we muddle our lives with technical jargon. Yes, we fund completely useless things. Ultimately, this is innovation. No one promised it would be pleasant.

We’ve taken over the digital world, created new rules, and started a new game. It’s not perfect, but we’re on a mission. To embrace the individual and find new ways to do finance and commerce. These may be wacky experiments, but there’s a vision, an understanding that money is transformative.

We’re moving slowly, one success at a time. Bitcoin. Ethereum. IC0. Uniswap. Solana. What’s next? Bio.xyz? HairDAO? Most will fail in their attempts to charge forward. But the few that survive will have global impact. We’re embracing the asymmetry of outcomes.

Yes, crypto is the real frontier. You don’t need a string of credentials to make a difference in this world. A few lines of code can go a long way. Bad ideas are sent to the moon (and back). But so are good ideas. And we need more of them.

So if you’re not in crypto, you should join us, the clowns, the charlatans, and the pilgrims. There is a lot of money to be made and a lot of wealth to be lost.

We always need new talent to help us get through the tough times. We can’t rely on divine intervention to move forward or we’ll just become vague optimists. We need new ideas and bold execution to keep the most clearly optimistic movement on the planet alive.

It’s not the baby boomers buying Bitcoin and Ethereum ETFs, it’s the non-coin folks who dare to get on the frontier who find the inspiration, overcome all odds, and build the spirit that drives crypto forward.

This is the spiritual sequel to Why I’m Less Than Infinitely Hostile to Crypto and Casino on Mars . If I haven’t convinced you yet that cryptocurrencies are a fruitful endeavor, you should also read these two articles.

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