For The Day We Take The Engine

This is a story about how I got disillusioned with the current state of crypto.

It's also a story about how I became increasingly convinced of its need.

I'll preface this with something of a disclaimer: a lot of what I'm about to say may come off as hypocritical. I have relied on credentialism and connections to get by for most of my life, flying in the face of the meritocracy of crypto in its current form. The promise of crypto is for all, yet here I will be quite darkly protective of it, even though its purpose - pseudonymous, uncensorable transactions - is one that I have no true 'need' of.

I apply arbitrary purity tests upon the general understanding of the fundamental technologies of crypto, yet barely understand the mechanisms of the Internet through which I'll post this. Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.)

In short, you probably won't gain anything from reading this. You might well think I'm being a sanctimonious asshole if you do.

Nonetheless, I've been involved in the crypto space in some form or another for over a decade, and having finally made the Hajj to ETHDenver, I feel the need to write something down.

This is a scream into the void, upon which I hope to look back on and laugh in years to come.

I've been listening to Pet Shop Boys - Integral on loop while I write this.

"Turning and Turning in the Widening Gyre, The Falcon Cannot Hear The Falconer"

Mass adoption for crypto is finally here. Anyone who looked at - or stood in - the queue to get into the Denver Sports Castle between the 18-20th of February can attest to that. I had a conversation with a candidate for the presidency of the United States, and discussed advertisements that played during the Superbowl in a bar.

That's as mainstream - from an American perspective - as you can get.

And yet, despite all the tremendous work ongoing, and the euphoria of attending a massive get-together of friends and colleagues, the foundations all feel shaky and weak - like it would take just one concerted push from the incumbent powers to scatter it all to the wind. It's easy to catastrophise every mooted Executive Order, or every proposed-then-reversed company integration (i.e. Discord), but it shouldn't need saying that we've not actually seen any widescale global resistance to crypto yet. The fact that we just had ETHDenver - and people travelled from all over the globe to attend - proves it.

"Things Fall Apart; The Centre Cannot Hold/Mere Anarchy Is Loosed Upon The World"

A large part of my anxiety stems - where I'm standing - from the 'sexiness' of being in Web3 (a silly name) as the current topic du jour attracting mops and sociopaths. The people we considered part of the KPI for mass adoption include the girl who is squealing to her friends in a coffee shop that "they can't believe how many more Tinder matches they get now that they have 'crypto CEO' in their bio" (an actual line I overheard), or the guy who tried pitching RugbyDAO in a club, rather than those who understand why Ethereum exists in the first place, or what it's capable of doing.

Similarly, I met with several 'CT-famous' personalities over the course of two weeks: one of whom had - depressingly - turned their pseudonymous persona into their entire personality. It made them incredibly difficult to talk to, and they were more interested in leveraging their follower count into social status and the opportunity to play at Master of the Universe by bending illiquid markets to their will. Like attracts like, and what with CT currently being the face of crypto, I'm concerned about what we're signalling as being desirable.

If you read that last paragraph and think I'm talking about you: I'm not. I've already had a word with them. It's telling that I feel a need to assure a few dozen folks like that, in case they think I've said their quiet part out loud.

I recognise that during the Dotcom bubble, people didn't gather at conferences en masse to talk about the TCP/IP protocol, but the social signalling I witnessed at ETHDenver belies the fact that in the event of, say, a global ban with teeth: these people aren't sticking around.

And there are people that we need to stick around for.

"The Blood-Dimmed Tide Is Loosed, And Everywhere The Ceremony Of Innocence Is Drowned"

When I arrived in Colorado, I turned on the TV and wasn't short of things to feel bleak about. Trudeau had invoked the Emergencies Act in Canada to freeze the bank accounts of protestors and their donors, and newsdesks were dissecting statistics about rate hikes and inflation.

The response of crypto maximalists to the protests? To cry havoc and demand Canadian bank runs. The response of the media to the protests? To attempt to convince everyone that freezing the funds of someone that donated lunch money was covered under emergency legislation.

Yesterday, while I wrote part of this from the comfort of my office, Russia invaded Ukraine, after two weeks of will-they-won't-they. Russian forces are shelling cities, and Ukrainian civilians are evacuating en masse. Names of places I never think of while living in the UK are getting dredged up as part of a march towards Kyiv - Chernobyl was recently taken by force.

The response of crypto maximalists to the invasion? To declare that it was now a matter of national security for the United States to become 'the most pro-crypto nation in the world'. The response of the media to the invasion? The New York Times ran a line on their front page that cryptocurrencies could be used to evade capital controls.

"The Best Lack All Conviction, While The Worst Are Full Of Passionate Intensity."

It was with all of this happening that I spent a week and a half in venues that were heaving with humans, surrounded with free beer, CBD soda and pizzas being handed out by guys in full Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle outfits, observing talks with names like "Into The Pussyverse" and walking around a Zen Zone with tranquil music, beanbags and tarot card readings, and wondering if every second person I spoke with was either high or just super excited to be out of the house for a major get-together for the first time in two years.

It was jarring. There were people hacking away on things, sure, but the overwhelming feeling was that of people speaking at each other.

Then I read this eGirl Capital article on solarpunk versus lunarpunk.

"Surely Some Revelation Is At Hand; Surely The Second Coming Is At Hand."

I won't rehash the contents of what is an excellent piece of writing, other than to say that there's a posited axis between "solarpunks" (unbridled optimism, crypto will shepherd us all into the sunlit uplands of DAOs, encapsulating all and sundry) and "lunarpunks" (privacy is a necessity for self-sufficiency, and we should be spending a lot more time building out software that enables this).

I don't know where I fall on this spectrum: I work - in public - for a DeFi DAO, but push code for tooling under pseudonyms. I don't use Tornado Cash due to the risk of potential contamination in the eyes of exchanges and the tax authorities, but the cypherpunk in me tells me that I have the right - if not the obligation - to only selectively reveal the parts of my financial history that are relevant to the interaction at hand.

The people I interact with daily online fall at various spots on this axis: ranging from people such as @joey__santoro (doxxed, founder/contributor to Fei), to @transmissions11 (name known but operates as pseudonymous, currently research engineer at Paradigm) and @dystopiabreaker (absolute unknown, cryptographer and nascent technophilosopher).

I suspect there's probably a four-quadrant graph you could throw together for this: solarpunk vs lunarpunk and unmasked vs anonymous, and further believe that most of us would sit squarely in the middle of it. The difference is important, though, as it comes down to what we envision crypto being used for, and to what end.

As an aside: what I find interesting about events such as ETHDenver is the name-anonymity that runs through a large chunk of the developer/DeFi group. I spent an entire week periodically bumping into @libevm, and would just refer to him by name as that: I don't know what his name is, and I don't care. That's pretty liberating, in a way - engaging with someone based on their ideas rather than the person themselves, even if you're standing right in front of them.

"The Darkness Drops Again; But Now I Know That Twenty Centuries Of Stony Sleep Were Vexed To Nightmare By A Rocking Cradle"

I'm digressing somewhat.

We have this vibrant ecosystem, filled - for better or for worse - with new blood, and while I can't speak for the NFT scene, I can for DeFi. Over the course of the last few years, we've built out a superb suite of tools and protocols that supplant the TradFi notions of yield-bearing accounts, derivatives, indices and options, backed by a wide range of various takes on stablecoin mechanisms. Absent the risk management procedures that exist in a typical financial institution, we're doing a very good job of replicating what exists, and improving where we can.

And yet: we use this infrastructure mostly to trade and flip shitcoins with ludicrous ponzinomics. Stables are still primarily dollar denominated, and beyond sites such as Bitrefill we are still beholden to centralised exchanges in order to interface with the fiat system to buy real-life assets, to pay our taxes and our bills: chokepoints that get our checking accounts frozen and our mortgage applications rejected. We donate to addresses created and maintained for emergency situations, with no certainty that the value we remit will actually be able to be easily exchanged for goods and services. We hand Bitcoin over to protestors, and then watch as they stumble around cluelessly trying to work how to leverage that into spending power. We put together DAOs for ludicrous things such as decentralised sperm banks, and then watch as they fall apart due to internecine squabbling over control of the treasury.

My point is that we're still woefully absent the parallel financial system that is required to properly entrench crypto into society, outside the bubble that we operate in. I can't pay for legal advice or buy my groceries with DAI or ETH - not once in Denver did I get offered the option to use an L2 to pay for a drink.

I see the emergence of such a system as inevitable: Colorado recently introduced legislation to pay state taxes in crypto, and I can hire digital labour - and choose to be paid for my own - in crypto, although coverage in this regard is pretty spotty. Perhaps it will be CDBCs that finally break the dam, perhaps it will be geopolitical pressures and lobbying. Perhaps institutions will be happier to start integrating their business processes on-chain when zero-knowledge proofs are more widely available in conjunction with data-siloed blockchain tech. Perhaps advertisers will arrive en masse (with all the concomitant attention) once we see the appearance of the first wallet-as-social-network that has a half-decent UX.

My point is: I believe that we're still early. Too early.

And this is the vulnerable point - evolved enough to make motions in Congress with lobbying, large enough to make the news on major price shifts, but isolated enough to strangle at a few key chokepoints and remove 95% of the eyeballs. Perhaps true lunarpunks would prefer this.

"And What Rough Beast, Its Hour Come Round At Last, Slouches Towards Bethlehem To Be Born?"

With all of this in mind, I figure that there are two ways I can contribute in a non-trivial way.

Firstly: I'll be going to law school at the end of this year. This is partially borne from the fact that my recent interactions with the legal system made it clear to me just how scant things are on the ground in terms of both crypto-specific law and the pool of legal professionals that are native to what we do and want to achieve (although perhaps this is simply generational).

My wider justification for throwing myself onto the wheel of credentialism once more is that once what we have built can no longer be swept aside, there needs to be a cohort of people who can comfortably walk in both worlds, willing to extend an open hand to the existing system to facilitate the merging of the two at the appropriate points.

Secondly: I'll be stepping away somewhat from my DeFi/DAO development work, in favour of putting together an intensive incubator program for emerging talent. Whether you believe you'd be more productive specialising within the crypto space as - among other things - a communicator, an accountant, a cryptographer or a developer, I believe that there's a set 'curriculum' of skills and knowledge that will help speed up the crossing of the Rubicon. To the best of my knowledge, something like that doesn't quite exist yet.

More pragmatically, in the event that the regulatory environment turns truly hostile (and we won't be able to rely on the beneficence of state actors for a good long while yet), I want to do my part in helping prepare for if the aforementioned open hand ever needs to turn into a fist, and development gets driven underground. In my mind, it'll be a lot easier to source the talent for continued work if they're already trained up while the environment is largely passive.

I arrived at ETHDenver excited and apprehensive. I left it confused, anxious, but optimistic.

We'll get there. We just need to continue sending more people uptrain.

For the day we take the engine.

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