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

Getting rich is relative. Rich to a poor person is freedom from needing to worry about money. Freedom from the weight of bills and rent hanging over your neck, and the necks of your family. We all have our problems and money doesn’t solve everything, but there is a kind of relief that can only be experienced when you cross the line from have-not to have.

And a protest is a deeply personal act. Even if we are against the same thing, we have our own motivations and reasons for why we are against it. I am against the idea of everyone being forced to play an unfair game. This game has sucked in the whole world with nowhere left to run and nowhere left to hide. Some people start out with huge advantages. Some people have the power to change the rules. Points get created out of thin air. This game causes unnecessary pain. Those are my reasons. You probably have your own.

But a new technology opens a new path. Many people 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 the freedom that lies on the other side, they’ve also seen the current game for what is really is.

Ethereum makes it obvious that anything can be money. We will disagree on the price depending on the day and mood of the market. But within a short span of time, coders, nerds, traders, and regular people created a new type of money out of consensus and math. A different money game exposes the current one as absurd because they are both absurd.

Ethereum’s existence chips away and subverts the seriousness of money as it exists today. And at the very same time, it is building an alternative economic structure. One that is described with many different properties, most of which have become VC buzzwords. But what I see is a system that aims to be fair. It is a populist technology. The commoner should be able to use it, verify its truth, and contribute to its resilience. This was always the most important and interesting thing about Ethereum, and Bitcoin before that. Ethereum is an ideal, like democracy, that aims to achieve the difficult balance between freedom and fairness.

If the Toni Morrison quote is true; if “the function of freedom is to free someone else”, then Ethereum is a means to realize that function at internet scale. It lets us break the stranglehold of money by first giving us small pockets of air.

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 other anecdotes like these, uglier and bloodier stories about how the origin of wealth comes from genocide, slavery, and theft. So how is the wealth derived from these origins any better or more legitimate than people getting rich from Bitcoin, or dog coins, or GameStop?

I can respect the hustler. I can respect the innovator. But I have no respect for the inheritor of wealth, the one born with extra points that were in some way passed on from someone who got lucky from being early. The digital money that has its origins in nerds and coders is far from perfect, but is more just, more fair, and cleaner than money inherited from the old world.

Money is something valuable that 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 entirely contextual. In other words, how the game is played depends on how the rules and points are defined. And if we can all understand the most basic and simplistic concepts of money, then we will all be better equipped to decide what paths to take and which games to play.

Switching out the parameters changes the game but leaves a root truth intact: money represents scarcity. We evolved in a world of scarcity and still live on a planet with limited resources, so we value what is difficult to obtain and we value what other people want. That will never change. We will always value scarcity even if it looks very different between eras. Even in the digital world, we recreate scarcity in the form of attention (likes and views), authority and status (blue checkmarks), or simply limiting the numbers of available units (BTC, ETH, NFTs, etc).

Open public blockchains like Ethereum show people what money is made of – the guts and bones of it. Money is not that serious. It’s made-up points for a made-up game. The difference now is we can see the rules more clearly. The price, the money itself, it’s all an agreement we have with each other. If enough people see the value in it, we can come up with a new agreement. We can create and play new games.

“Evil is not the inclusion of finite games in an infinite game, but the restriction of all play to one or another finite game.” - James P. Carse

Money is useful. It’s an easy way to compare different 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 wouldn’t normally trust each or have any way of communicating share an understanding of what is valuable. This can be done with trade, barter, or debt, but money makes the transaction smoother because no other relationship or 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 can build up when different tribes of apes come into conflict with 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 by inflicting damage and 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 this system starts to cause more pain than it prevents. If this system starts to require 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 including what counts as money. This machine uses a type of math that was once classified as a munition, a weapon. This math was a threat to national security and put under strict export control so it couldn’t fall 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 over the years. We’ve played many different versions of the money game. Do you believe we’ve discovered the perfect one? The only one?