In I776, Thomas Paine wrote “the cause of America is, in a great measure, the cause of all mankind.” The nation has never fully lived up to its promises and it probably never will, but the idea itself was a good one. It was the idea that there would always be a seat of power, and that seat must be occupied, but it did not have to be held by a single man or family. Instead, a place could exist where “Law is King.”

Regardless of how you feel about America’s past and present, and what ideals it is worthy of holding the torch for, we should have a backup plan. And the truer that plan is to the spirit of “all mankind”, the better. Because there is a place that takes in all and welcomes all and pretty much treats everyone the same and that is the internet, not the platforms on top of it, but that basic thread of freedom that ties it all together. Ethereum is for the people of the internet. It extends that thread and lets us weave together little patches resistant to manipulation and control.

Ethereum is all about decentralization and decentralization is about power: making power slippery to hold and spreading it out as far and as wide as possible. It is a cultural aspiration closely linked to neutrality, fairness, accessibility, and credibility. The basic function of decentralization is to maximize participation and minimize privilege.

Ethereum is simple. It is a way to agree. Agree on the state of reality. Agree to use the same rules. Anyone with the proper motivation should be able to follow, in as deep or as shallow a level as they want, the chain of logic from beginning to end to verify how a point of truth was reached. The best way we’ve discovered so far, for how to create an objective reality out of the chaos that is the internet, is to have many people contributing to the truth and few people capable of dictating the truth, which results in a more legitimate strain of what is real.

It also lets us agree on rules across the internet. We can create protocols, contracts, and laws capable of interacting with each other, and make it so these rules cannot be undone. For example, you can create money from this source by making a rule that there will only ever be 21 million coins. This rule – the limit of 21 million units – is now an objective fact in the digital world. People may or may not care about your little coins in some random corner of the internet, but they won’t be able to change the fact that this constraint is solid. If they believe that math is a logical system that can’t be cheated, then they also have reason to believe that there will never be any more than 21 million units.

Rules can get much more complex than this simple example of scarcity. But the idea is that rules can be made with a new type of guarantee. An idea that becomes more important as software eats more of the world.

There is a big word that captures why I think Ethereum matters: simulacrum. It means the imaginary thing, the copy, is more influential for the real world than the thing it is trying copy. It’s the idea that life imitates art. The internet is like a digital mirror for our physical world. This reflection affects how we see ourselves, how we behave in our bodies. If you feel the mirror has become too distorted, that the image has been manipulated in a way that is not to your benefit and controlled in a way that makes you feel powerless, then Ethereum should make sense. It’s a way to choose something different, and in the process, take away, not only money, but also attention and legitimacy from the old way. It’s like using a cleaner mirror.

Increasingly, we interact with a screen instead of a person. At the gas station, at the airport, post office, grocery store, etc. we pay and interact through software. The question is do we always want a person to be in control of the software intermediating our world or do we want the option to put control under a set of rules? Do people even know we have a choice?

The internet is defined by the language of code. Compared to words, code is unambiguous. There is less room for interpretation. You can render entire worlds with words, but that world only lives in the mind of that reader. With code, entire worlds can be rendered in a way that is the same for everyone.

Ethereum lets us set our technologies with intention. We can apply constraints, boundaries, and limitations on our inventions. It’s a world where Law is King and Code is Law.