This is a response to the RabbitHole quest prompt: “What is keeping you motivated?”.

The crypto space is exciting to me because of its potential to rewrite and improve the ways in which (and the scale at which) humans coordinate. Look at the reason I’m writing this post: because a blockchain is rewarding me to do so. About 4,000 others have done the same before me in the last 48 hours. That’s coordination at scale.

Smart contracts enable ways to funnel value in a manner congruent with what its participants want it to. Retroactive public goods funding is an example of such a scheme. At scale, these structures can form online governments and nations that can direct their resources in ways that much more closely reflect their citizens’ values, relative to modern democracies where the only granularity of choice amounts to choosing one of a given set of options which are often not meaningfully different, nor aligned with the long-term benefit of their citizenry.

Digitization increases the clock speed of trade, business, finance, information exchange, science, education, journalism, social connection, cultural remixing, and everything else it touches. Governance has been a tougher nut to crack, because of the human coordination scale involved in moderating such a system, but crypto offers one of the most credible ways to get there.

For these reasons, I remain optimistic.