“Crypto” - From Ancient Greek κρυπτός (kruptós, “hidden, secret”).
Crypto is built upon anonymity, it is right there in the name cryptocurrencies. We have seen a plethora of social movements, tech innovations, and billion dollar businesses built upon the principles of cryptoanarchy, decentralization, anti-authority, mutual aid, etc. Cryptoanarchy, and thus the entire blockchain industry, is predicated on building a viable third market entity outside of the government or corporate interest that lies entirely in the hands of the people and is built only to serve the people no matter who they are.
Crypto = freedom. Freedom from policital oppression and gaslighting preventing progress. Freedom from financial harassment and slavery. Freedom from complacency and conformity to fully realize your personal potential. Cryptography protects nearly every right we think we have in an online and connected world. Any effort to revoke privacy is an effort to revoke all your rights.
This is a revolution. There might not be violence (yet) but by our very natuve, we are fighting to destroy an unjust system and that system will always fight back to destroy us as well.
The ability to program value and create economies of our own creation that will drive novel outcomes is at our fingertips. While crypto has mainly been focused on the financial (payments, DeFi, etc.) we can go far beyond that by codifying social values or even ecological system into life. We aren’t confined to “more capital efficient” sharehodler agreements via governance tokens. We can regulate, reform, and reimagine entire economies centered around citizen happiness or ecological health just as easily as we can program numba go up. We have to want to though. At Debt DAO we will work harder to make technologically AND socially progressive products that will improve the world, not just the easiest thing that gets us clout and reputation.
The beautiful thing about cryptoanarchy and blockchains is you can’t prevent anyone from doing anything. So while we might vilify capitalistic motivations, we can’t directly ban them. We can resent KYC and its applications but cant directly ban them. So we can build both systems, the old and the new together. However we should not allow the old system to exist and . “Adoption” is a psyop to dilute the cultural value of crypto, its most powerful weapon in this revolution. By assimilating “normies” we denigrate the very thing we are trying to build. Instead of creating informed, politically active crypto-anarchists, we are creating pump-and-dump NFT scriptkiddies. Of course there is a “right” way to encourage people into crypto and thats less about hype and more about educating them on their right to privacy and how to protect it.
Crypto’s history is laden with passionate and brilliant people risking their lives and coming up with ingenious ways, including getting Open Source Code as a First Amendment Right in USA. Practically all of the technology we use everyday in crypto was highly illegal just a few decades ago yet now it available to people in developing nations for free. What is legal is not always moral. We believe we have the duty to make the world morally better regardless of “legality”. With crypto living outside the bounds of nation-state jurisdiction, we can create our own laws based on our own morality. Given crypto is a vast improvement over past business operation technology, embedding crypto values as deep and tight into L1 protocols, dapps, tokenomics, etc. will turn the world into our political realm once Ethereum becomes the global settlement layer to give us lead in economic real.