Why can we still trust cryptocurrency?

Original Title: "The Optimistic Crypto Pitch"

Original Author: Matti, Zee Prime Capital

Original translation: 0x26

Editor's note: The development of cryptocurrency has entered deep waters, and the importance of cultural and social attributes has been further enhanced. Technology is almost difficult to become a real moat, and the criticism of new terms and narratives far outweighs the support.

Faced with these sudden changes, many experienced players feel uncomfortable, even shouting that cryptocurrencies are "done for". But as community members say, "belief is the only way out, which is why few people can succeed." Matti's article, The Optimistic Crypto Pitch, explains why we can still believe in cryptocurrencies. The following is the full text of the article, translated as follows by LVDONG:

Cryptocurrencies have different definitions in the eyes of many people: some think of it as a luxury item for geeks, some think of it as currency anarchism, and some even call it a ridiculous eyewash. **Today's cryptocurrency industry has long departed from its original libertarian dream, and is no longer just a small circle of Satoshi Nakamoto and a few cypherpunk computer scientists. Cryptocurrencies have gone through the process of commercialization, becoming more diverse in ideology.

In fact, the biggest enemy of cryptocurrency is not those who are skeptical, but those who dare to tamper with the "Bible". Bitcoin supporters do not like the disciples of Ethereum, and the followers of Ethereum do not like the supporters of Solana. There is a reason why I am exaggerating here. Usually, the most intolerant minority are the loudest. But the conflict is obvious-not between inside and outside the circle, but between different currencies.

Talking about conflicts may sound pessimistic, but it only demonstrates how this subculture imitates past (and present) religious conflicts. **If cryptocurrency is considered a religion, it is a religion centered around currency, finance, and business revolution. The gods here are interchangeable, the narratives are flexible, and the financial expectations are scalable. Cryptocurrency replaces 'We believe in God' with 'We believe in our coins'.

Optimism

The optimism I mentioned refers to a person understanding that he has the potential to change the world and accepting it, thus drawing strength from his innate nature.

Optimists tend to experiment and take risks. They love freedom and detest tyranny. But when optimists detest something, they pay the price. They take bets because they know, as Seneca wrote, "When people can hate without risk, their stupidity is easily aroused, and the motivation to intensify hatred arises on its own."

Optimists do not feel the need to represent others in governance. They understand that they often make mistakes, but still try. They seize the opportunity to explore, create, and rebuild the world in their own image. Optimists understand that expanding knowledge is the lifeline of life, enabling their descendants to discard old ideas and follow new ones.

Optimists understand that resources are not limitations but opportunities, because ideas empower resources and use the surrounding environment to serve themselves. Optimists embrace change and see it as a necessary condition for progress.

How does this optimism relate to the promotion of cryptocurrency? Initially, a person who could imagine a world where the government no longer controls currency affairs, his deep optimism became the origin of cryptocurrency.

It is not because governments are evil, but because they are prone to corruption. And this is not because people are evil. The longer institutions govern a community, the easier it is for them to grasp power. After a while, they start to become inward-looking and primarily serve themselves. Why?

Because over time, they become no longer relevant, dogmas remain stagnant while the world moves forward. But they want to survive. They cling tightly to correlation. Suddenly, the world serves them, while they no longer serve the world. To survive, they need to exert more power at the expense of the interests of the governed community.

The original concept of cryptocurrency - Bitcoin, is about reducing dependence on power, not relying on violent monopolies, but relying on immutable code in the network. 'Stupid dream'. However, it succeeded. This optimistic experiment is now worth trillions of dollars. Today, it's not just Bitcoin, but more.

Crypto

The volatility of cryptocurrencies is very obvious. The higher the rise, the more painful the fall. Some natural laws also apply to financial markets and human spirit. Cryptocurrencies never sleep, and there is always something happening.

Supporters and critics cannot agree on whether meme coin is good or bad, and some succumb to price fluctuations. They also cannot reconcile whether VC coin appears in the market at a crazy valuation before or after releasing the minimum viable product.

Investors jump from one narrative to another, funding things that either won't succeed, can't succeed, or even if they do succeed, no one will use. Most things will go to zero, absolutely zero. That's okay. 'Wait, I'm here to promote cryptocurrencies optimistically.'

Media is information. Meme coins are a medium, cryptocurrency is a medium, and human behavior unfolds in new ways with the push of new technology. Zeroing is part of the game.

It doesn't matter even if it goes to zero, because cryptocurrency is still the most optimistic technological movement in the world. Every technological and cultural revolution will provoke exploitation precisely because it is revolutionary. This opens up opportunities for asymmetric information, and people quickly (mistakenly) take advantage of these opportunities for their own profit.

But ultimately, in the field of cryptocurrency, people are beginning to address governance issues, attempting to establish a new internet, trustworthy and neutral payment channels, various interesting use cases for new physical infrastructure, funding research projects that are unable to obtain funding elsewhere, busy with the monetization of culture, achieving financial freedom before releasing a product used by over a thousand users, establishing a casino as an alternative financial product, attempting to establish new cities and challenging death. Most of these are likely to be misleading. But this demonstrates the great spirit that cryptocurrency offers.

Cryptocurrency is like the wild west meeting Las Vegas. It's a frontier where you can get rich overnight, but more likely to lose all your wealth and be scammed by sex workers. It's a place where dreams come true, where you can conquer or lose your fortune to gambling, and conflicts happen every day.

Pessimists and Optimists

For years, I have carried Peter Thiel's simplified 2 x 2 framework of optimism and pessimism in my mind. When you have a hammer (everything looks like a nail to you), Thiel distinguishes between explicit and implicit pessimism and optimism.

He said, "If you see the future as definite, then it makes sense to understand and shape it in advance... If you expect an uncertain future ruled by randomness, you will give up trying to control it."

Vague Pessimists "react only to events and hope things won't get worse... Vague pessimists cannot know whether the inevitable decline will be quick or slow, catastrophic or gradual. He can only wait for it to happen."

Definite Pessimist "Obsessed with the idea that things will get worse...believes the future is predictable, but because it will be bleak, he must be prepared for it."

Vague optimists see a better future, but they don't know how to achieve it. In the end, clear optimists see an improved future, so they plan and work hard to achieve it. This is a simplified version of the narrative on my Twitter:

I define politics and technology as the vertical dividing line between the explicit and the implicit. This is because politics is not about wealth creation, but about governance and distribution. At best, good politics is a promoter of technology and entrepreneurship. But it does not create the future itself. Technology does. It is the matrix on which society unfolds and the network through which information is exchanged among humans.

The horizontal demarcation line is about the role of the individual and the role of the collective. Optimists emphasize the aforementioned becoming the foundation. It is more about bottom-up change and robustness through decentralization. Pessimists, on the other hand, believe that the world is fragile and want to rely on top-down control to maintain it. Only through their power can they solve problems and prevent things from getting worse.

Let's start with the explicit pessimism of AI narrative. This is explicit because it relies on a technological paradigm. Why pessimism? At the center of this narrative is the machine, a greater existence than humanity itself. This is a new interpretation of God, through chatbots conversing with mortals. Concentrated algorithms rule everything. We are at the mercy of this technology.

Either the inevitable death brought by this powerful presence, or perhaps we can study the alignment of the Bible (the principle of consistency). AI is "the interpretation of Abraham (the supreme existence)" rather than artificial intelligence. Humanity has become nothing more than an object. We are powerless, unable to stop it, only to submit and hope not to be destroyed by this fierce force.

As for the ambiguous pessimists, they are the awakeningists. They believe that everything has already been invented, and now we can only redistribute. At the center of this interpretation is power. Utilizing power to distribute from the strong to the weak. There is no other way, capitalism has failed, and we can only freeze humanity, relying on bureaucratic manipulation to manage, plunging us into a perplexing situation like a paper straw (emphasizing formal correctness while neglecting 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 for us all to lose equally. Only the promotion of surface diversity and ideological homogeneity remains, to be accomplished by those whose rules are not fully applicable, because they are here to save us from original sin. The world has already ended, and progress through the use of energy has stopped, because the only progress is tragic equality.

Now let's talk about those unclear optimists who say 'things didn't develop this way, so we should go back to fix it.' But how? Going back is not the solution. The future path is unknown. Embrace nationalism? Of course, it is applicable for cultural cohesion, but the changing nature of patriotic individuals may transform into a destructive machine.

Unclear Optimist refuses the homogeneity and meaningless bureaucratic burden of globalism, but is confused by the transformation of new technological realities. It feels threatened and may tend to be narrow-minded. It does not know how to accept technology as the functional substrate of society.

Banning social media? Is this like banning printing presses? Reform has already begun, suppressing it will ultimately backfire. How to control one's own affairs and strive towards a specific future?

The Clear Optimism of Cryptocurrency

If you've been in the cryptocurrency space for a while, you'll know it's a mess. Absolute chaos. But the energy of this chaotic, noisy, and misleading technological revolution is due to a strong desire to take control of oneself.

It starts with finance, because the market is a machine that controls resources. If we change the structure, we can redirect the flow of value towards things that the baby boomer generation is afraid to try. They like the status quo, but cryptocurrencies don't. It hopes for change, but doesn't rely solely on protest. It is in construction. It takes risks. It doesn't want to occupy Wall Street. It wants to liberate it.

Cryptocurrency is the sun punk. Cryptocurrency is about financial freedom, decentralized cities, and funding scientific experiments. Cryptocurrency is the disobedient naughty child. On the surface, it is innocent, but the decentralized, politically neutral currency without corruption and bias is a major technological revolution. It frees up funds. It ignores panic politics. Does the tyranny of AML and KYC make the world safer, or the opposite?

Cryptocurrency has created a new class of assets that can transfer wealth from one generation to another. As housing becomes unaffordable, cryptocurrency has created new games to bypass the bureaucratic machine that prevents young people from owning anything and progressing. It rejects the idea of 'being happy with owning nothing'. It wants to own everything, even if it means suffering. But it wants to suffer on its own terms.

Yes, we release NFTs without value. Yes, we push overvalued tokens to clueless retail investors. Yes, we deceive ourselves with technical terms. Yes, we fund completely useless things. In the end, this is innovation. No one promised it would be pleasant.

We have occupied the digital world, set new rules, and started a new game. It's not perfect, but we are on a mission. Accept the individual, find new ways to conduct finance and business. These may be quirky experiments, but there is a vision, understanding money is the ability to change.

We move slowly forward, one success at a time. BTC. Ethereum. ICO. Uniswap. Solana. What's next? Bio.xyz? HairDAO? Most will fail in the attempts to charge ahead. But the few that survive will have a global impact. We embrace the asymmetry of outcomes.

Yes, cryptocurrency is truly at the forefront. You don't need a string of qualifications 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 good ideas are the same. And we need more of these ideas.

So, if you're not in the cryptocurrency space, you should join us clowns, scammers, and pilgrims. There's a lot of money to be made, a lot of wealth to be lost.

We always need new talents to help us get through difficult times. We cannot rely on divine intervention to move forward, otherwise we will become ambiguous optimists. We need new ideas and bold execution to maintain the most clear optimistic movement on this planet.

It is not the baby boomer generation buying Bitcoin and Ethereum ETFs, but those brave coinless civilians who dare to enter the forefront, find inspiration, overcome obstacles, and build the spirit that drives the progress of cryptocurrency.

This is a spiritual sequel to 'Why I'm Not Totally Anti-Cryptocurrency' and 'The Martian Casino'. If I haven't convinced you yet that cryptocurrency is a rewarding venture, you should also read these two articles.

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