The entirety of what I have to say can be boiled down to:

Crypto as a technology is as foundational as electricity, internet, and artificial intelligence.

The rest is just details. Details related to:

• Currency

• Microeconomics

• Macroeconomics

• Self-Custody

• Peer-to-Peer Contracts

• Digital content and media

• Collective ownership

• Intellectual property rights

• Technocapitalism

• Independent careers

• Small businesses

• Data rights

• Platform interoperability

The vegetables first

Crypto is already 10+ years in, making it seem as if we are mature in tenure. But the closer reality is that we are unregulated, lacking standards and ethics, and are rife with bandits in the same matter of the western gold rush.

As such, here are my criticisms of which I do not have solutions:

1. Funding, whether venture, user, program, or infrastructure, is fundamentally reflexive and lacking thoughtfulness. There is a systemic mismanagement of liquidity to the tune of billions that results in counterproductive incentives, collective sabotage, and horrid market precedents.

2. Quantitative thinking is dogmatic with little patience for qualitative models.

3. Polar disciplines (developer x designer) are at odds for TAM-supremacy instead of cooperating for building the best apps, products, and services.

4. Big players rush vertical instead of fostering horizontal. (1)(2)(3)

5. Public discourse rarely escapes platitudes. Our social engagement is foundational for the broader vision, and yet we bicker (illogically) as if we are not on the same macroeconomic team.

6. The majority of our industry members are young and inexperienced. This is a part of life, but we improperly weigh their opinions and dictate product, service, and infrastructure decisions on them.

7. We over-index on extraction as long as we can take fees, while being intellectually dishonest about it.

8. We know that culture, entertainment, media, and games are the next things we need to focus on but do not fund (1), foster (3), or have honest dialogue to figure out scaling (5).

9. We over-index on troll culture as a marketing and advertising mechanism.

10. We under-index on marketing and advertising.

Crypto really is the wild wild web. It attracts all kinds of people in the search for digital gold.

The well-intentioned dreamers are so often bent toward the bandit instead of the inverse. This has led into a moral decay that takes significant effort, time, and attention to rectify. Often justified for the sake of the greater good. Greater goods that we don't fund.

The dessert

With all our problems however, there is no other industry that is as fun, energetic, and open to the diversity of characters the world has to offer.

Crypto compliments that I cannot take credit for:

1. There is no credentialism. Anyone with internet connection, devices, and a functioning brain can join, grow, and master the field. This affords opportunity to generate wealth, networks, and influence in a tangible and meaningful way.

2. Stablecoins allow poverty stricken citizens to escape currency destitution and arbitrary authoritarianism. Raising the chances of economic evolution worldwide.

3. There is no demographic with as much discipline, interest, skill, and resource variability.

4. There may be no other field with as many genius-level youth.

5. Ideologically you can find your niche in crypto instead of being forced to sublimate.

6. People can make more money in a month than their parents made in a decade.

7. Participating earnestly in the field will likely develop upper-quartile competencies in neighboring fields (economics, ai, product, software, governance, marketing, design, etc).

8. You can control your own money.

9. You can control your own data.

10. You can make and control your own peer-to-peer agreements.

Sticking with the wild wild web model, there is genuinely, and metaphorically, digital gold.

For the same reasons bandits, grifters, scammers, and hackers come in droves, so too do the visionaries, experts, geniuses, and iconoclasts. Crypto, if successful long term will afford:

• Independent careerists with verifiable ownership of their assets and earning funnels.

• Platform interoperability that creates higher standards for user and platform value contracts.

• Stable money regardless of geolocation.

• Macroeconomies for high agency youth to generate wealth and quality of life improvements.

• Talent pools and distribution to foster the next boom of small businesses.

• A more financially literate civilization.

• Checks and balances on over zealous nation states.

20,000 hours later

After 5 years of obsessive experimentation, engagement, and questioning, I feel confident in the claim that for all the annoying parts of crypto, it has been, and continues to be, well worth the headache.

There are valid conversations on why money should or shouldn't matter, or what is the best market model. These conversations do not deal with the current reality however.

And in our current reality, crypto is directly pointed at fostering a more abundant world.