everything else is boring

November 2022

Crypto is a fully opt-in and opt-out system: anyone can enter and exit anytime they want. But I’m willing to bet that no one who enters ever exits. Seeing the power of blockchains and the future of crypto economies is a one-way, mind-expanding door.

Back in 2018, when I was still on the sidelines, I heard Naval on Periscope (RIP) talk about his fascination with crypto. At the time, it was lost on me. But now I’m in the space, and wanting to spend all my time on it, I’ve found his words resonating (not for the first or last time):

“Crypto is a revolution, [...] Once you figure it out, it’s hard to think about anything else. It’s hard to think that there’s any other thing that’s going on that’s as important [...] Anyone who’s interested in the intersection of politics, economics, technology, and finance will just find cryptocurrency and blockchains to be this really interesting rabbit hole. I think humans have created something that’s larger than ourselves. It’s like when we first invented markets. When you invent something that big, it’s hard for anyone to figure out how it works. We’re all now collectively trying to figure out how to describe it and what its properties are. It almost feels like there’s this organism larger than ourselves that we’re all working on co-evolving.”

Before crypto, I hadn’t found an intellectual home. Like any existential-thinking twenty-something, that fostered some anxiety. Everything changed once I jumped in.

“Falling down the rabbit hole” has become a right of passage for new entrants. Ask people about theirs and they’ll describe a meandering journey of reading papers, listening to podcasts, and watching YouTube videos for months, trying to piece together a coherent mental model of the space.

At some point, Joel Monegro’s words ring true: “the deeper you go, the more boring most everything else in tech seems in comparison. Few things out there are fundamentally changing the structure of markets at a macro scale the way blockchains are.”

Wrapping your head around the boundless opportunity is a crossing of the rubicon. You start looking at the world through a completely new lens, and everything else looks stale.

A lot of crypto’s interestingness comes from Balaji’s idea of founding vs. inheriting. Most economic and social systems around us are inherited. They’ve hit a state of maturity where they’re more inclined to preserve what they have than evolve. Crypto is founding a new parallel society that fulfils the original promise of the internet: an open, permissionless, peer-to-peer network of sovereign individuals.

New institutions are getting built bottom-up not top-down. In this process, we’re going back to first principles on foundational ideas like freedom, sound money, public goods, property rights, community, and privacy.

One of my favourite effects of crypto’s “founding” is the collective abundance mentality and non-zero-sumness. Technology trends this way because it produces more interconnectedness. But there’s definitely scarcity and zero-sum thinking in web2.

Open crypto networks supercharge the non-zero-sum tendencies of technology. Everything is a lego block for other people to use, remix, and build on top of. Tokens are creating entirely new markets. Markets are inherently non-zero-sum because people can acquire resources, while the person on the other side of the trade gets rewarded.

In founding a new system, crypto has also avoided legacy conceptions of human capital. Credentials aren’t a proxy for potential anymore. Passion and skills, demonstrated through proof of work, are what matters. The smartest minds in the world are in crypto. And they’re from every background.

The arrow of progress only points one way. People will keep choosing to become citizens of the crypto economy until we hit a tipping point. A more inclusive, transparent, meritocratic, and ownable system wins every time.