Most people get into crypto for the money. Either to get rich, or as a protest.

Getting rich is relative. To some, it means freedom from a type of dread: “When each bill hitting the mat no longer represents an existential threat you are freed from an inhibiting and oppressive form of daily fear” as Zadie Smith puts it.

Many have already had a taste of being early on some new coin or token or NFT. Or creating a platform, a community, a piece of art that both lives in an alternate system and is worth real, tangible, freedom-giving money. This temporary glitch in the Matrix has appeared to more and more people who never expected to see it. Normal people, poor people, have not only seen what lies on the other side, they’ve also seen the current game for what is really is.

As a tool for protest, Ethereum can be used to boycott the old way. It disregards borders. It allows for endless experimentation. It’s like the internet but with internet-native money games, which sounds bad until you think about the power vacuum left by the internet. With nothing in place to represent scarcity, the currency of the internet became attention, which set off a brutal race for who could best control our eyeballs and fingers.

In the 1600s, Manhattan was traded for $24 worth of goods including beads and trinkets. Adjusted for inflation, that’s about $1000 in today’s money. This trade was the genesis, the starting point, of the modern world’s financial center. There are worse stories than this one, but the point is, how is the wealth derived from these origins any better or more legitimate than people getting rich from Bitcoin, or dog coins, or GameStop? The digital money that has its origins in nerds and coders is not perfect, but the old way of doing things has left a trail of suffering and ugliness, a stench a lot of people are sick of so why wouldn’t they try something new?

Money is something other people want to own. It is usually represented with numbers. The numbers make it seem objective and scientific like a kind of hard reality. But it’s not. It’s made-up points for a made-up game. Crypto lets us see the rules more clearly, the guts and bones of it.

Ethereum makes it obvious that anything can be money. Within a short span of time, nerds, traders, and artists have created new types of value. A different money game exposes the current one as absurd because they are both absurd. The existence of one chips away at and subverts the seriousness of the other. But the most interesting thing is the populism. The commoner should be able to use it, verify its truth, and contribute to its resilience. The system is always questioning who gets the right or has the power to do what? Ethereum is an ideal, like democracy, that aims to achieve that difficult balance between freedom and fairness.

Money is useful. It’s an easy way to compare things. You can go to any market in the world and get yourself a meal if you and the seller agree on the price. Money helps people who have no reason to trust each other or have no other way of communicating share an understanding of what is valuable. This can be done with trade, barter, or debt, but money makes it more universal because no other shared understanding is needed. It’s a common language and just like language, it’s largely arbitrary. Also, like language, it has profound effects on how we see and behave in the world.

The current money game has legitimate qualities. It created an environment for order, stability, and prosperity after the chaos of World War II. Games of politics, money, and even sports give humans an outlet for war. Competing over made-up points releases the tension that builds up when different tribes of apes live next to each other. If a game is simply an interaction between two or more players, then the most brutal game is war. There needs to be no shared understanding or agreement in war. The only objective is to take. Take resources and take lives, inflict suffering on your opponents. War is the game with the highest stakes. And money can act as a hedge against violence.

But this usefulness is not permanent. If the system starts to cause more pain and destruction than it prevents. If this system requires more and more violence in order to be maintained, then we owe it to ourselves and our children to try something else.

Money is a story we all have to agree on. And for most of us, this story is no longer working. We have a new machine that lets us agree on new stories. This machine uses a type of math that was once classified as a munition, a weapon. It threatened national security and was restricted from falling into enemy hands. This math – cryptography – serves as the backbone of cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum. And this is the structure we are using to change the story of money.

Humans have used many types of money. We’ve played many versions of the money game. Do you believe we’ve discovered the perfect one? The only one?