Encryption is still a belief

Author: Matti, Zee Prime Capital

Cryptocurrency has different definitions in the eyes of many: some see it as a luxury for geeks, others view it as monetary anarchism, and some even call it an absurd scam. The current crypto industry has strayed far from its original libertarian dreams and is no longer the small circle of Satoshi Nakamoto and a few cypherpunk computer scientists. Cryptocurrency has undergone a process of commercialization, becoming ideologically more diverse.

In fact, the biggest enemy of cryptocurrency is not those who are skeptical, but those who dare to tamper with the "Bible." Bitcoin supporters dislike Ethereum believers, while Ethereum believers do not favor Solana advocates. There is a reason I exaggerate here. Typically, the least tolerant minority is the loudest. But the conflict is evident—it's not a struggle between insiders and outsiders, but a battle between different coins.

Talking about conflict sounds rather pessimistic, but it merely shows how this subculture mimics past (and present) religious conflicts. If cryptocurrency is a religion, it is a religion centered around the revolution of money, finance, and commerce. The gods here are interchangeable, the narratives are flexible, and the financial expectations are scalable. Cryptocurrency replaces "We believe in God" with "We believe in our coin."

1. Optimism

The optimism I refer to is the understanding that one has the potential to change the world and accepting this, thus drawing strength from one's innate nature.

Optimists tend to experiment and take risks for themselves. They love freedom and despise tyranny. But when an optimist detests something, they pay the price. They place bets because they know, as Selina wrote, "When people can hate without risk, their stupidity is easily ignited, and the motivation to reinforce hatred will emerge."

Optimists do not feel the need to rule on behalf of others; they understand that they often make mistakes but still try. They seize opportunities to explore, create, and rebuild the world in their own image. Optimists understand that the ever-expanding knowledge is the rope of life, allowing their descendants to discard old ideas and follow new thoughts.

Optimists realize that resources are not limitations but opportunities, as ideas empower resources to serve them by leveraging their surroundings. Optimists embrace change and view it as a necessary condition for progress.

How does this optimism relate to the promotion of cryptocurrency? Initially, it was a person who could envision a world where the government no longer controlled monetary affairs, and their deep optimism became the origin of cryptocurrency.

Not because governments are evil, but because they are prone to corruption. And this is not because people are evil. The longer institutions govern a community, the easier it is for them to seize power. After a while, they begin to look inward, primarily serving themselves. Why?

Because over time, they become irrelevant, dogmas stagnate, while the world moves forward. But they want to survive. They cling tightly to relevance. Suddenly, the world serves them, and they no longer serve the world. To survive, they need to exert more power at the expense of the community they govern.

The original idea of cryptocurrency—Bitcoin—was about reducing dependence on power, relying not on violent monopolies but on immutable code within the network. "A foolish dream." Yet, it succeeded. This optimistic experiment is now worth trillions of dollars. Today, it's not just Bitcoin, but much more.

2. Crypto

The ups and downs of cryptocurrency are very apparent. The higher it rises, the more painful the fall. Some natural laws apply equally to financial markets and the human spirit. Cryptocurrency never sleeps; there is always something happening.

Supporters and critics cannot agree on whether meme coins are good or bad, and some succumb to price volatility. They also cannot reconcile whether VC coins appear in the market at crazy valuations before or after the release of a minimum viable product.

Investors jump from one narrative to another, funding things that either won't succeed, can't succeed, or even if they do succeed, no one will use. Most things will go to zero, completely to zero. That's okay. "Wait, I came here for the optimistic cryptocurrency pitch."

The medium is the message. Meme coins are a medium, cryptocurrency is a medium, and human behavior unfolds in new ways driven by new technologies. Going to zero is part of the game.

Even going to zero is fine because cryptocurrency remains the most optimistic technological movement in the world. Every technological and cultural revolution triggers exploitation precisely because it is revolutionary. This opens opportunities for information asymmetry, and people quickly (mis)use these opportunities for their own gain.

But ultimately, in cryptocurrency, people begin to tackle problems, trying to solve governance issues (even if they fail), attempting to build a new internet, trustworthy neutral payment channels, various interesting use cases for new physical infrastructure, funding research projects that cannot get funding elsewhere, busy with cultural monetization, achieving financial freedom before launching a product used by thousands, establishing casinos as alternative financial products, attempting to build new cities, and challenging death. Most of these may be misguided. But this shows the great spirit that cryptocurrency offers.

Cryptocurrency is the Wild West meeting Las Vegas; it is a frontier where one can become rich overnight, but more likely lose all wealth and be scammed by sex workers. It is a place where dreams come true, where one can conquer or gamble away wealth, and conflicts occur daily.

3. Pessimists and Optimists

For years, I have carried in my mind Peter Thiel's simplified 2x2 framework of optimism and pessimism. When you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail (anything in your eyes looks like a nail). Thiel distinguishes between clear and unclear pessimism and optimism.

He said, "If you see the future as clear, it makes sense to understand and work to shape it in advance… If you expect an uncertain future ruled by randomness, you will give up trying to master it."

Unclear pessimists "only react to events happening, hoping things won't get worse… Unclear pessimists cannot know whether the inevitable decline is fast or slow, catastrophic or gradual. They can only wait for it to happen."

Clear pessimists "are obsessed with how things will get worse… believing the future is predictable, but since it will be bleak, they must prepare for it."

Unclear optimists see a better future, but they do not know how to achieve it. Finally, clear optimists, see an improved future, so they plan and work to realize it. This is a simplified version of my narrative on Twitter:

I frame politics and technology as a vertical dividing line between the clear and the unclear. This is because politics is not about wealth creation, but about governance and distribution. At best, good politics is a facilitator of technology and entrepreneurship. But it does not create the future itself. Technology does. It is the matrix of societal unfolding, the network of information exchange between humans.

The horizontal dividing line is about the role of the individual versus the collective. Optimists emphasize the aforementioned becoming foundational. It is more about bottom-up change and decentralized robustness. Pessimists, on the other hand, believe the world is fragile and want to rely on top-down control to maintain it. Only they can solve problems through power to prevent things from getting worse.

Let's start with the clear pessimism of the AI narrative. This is clear because it relies on a technological paradigm. Why is it pessimistic? At the center of this narrative is the machine, as a being greater than humanity itself. It is a new interpretation of God, conversing with mortals through chatbots. Centralized algorithms dominate everything. We are in the mercy of this technology.

It is either the inevitable death brought by this powerful being, or perhaps we can study the Bible of alignment (consistent principles). AI as "Abraham's interpretation (the supreme being)" rather than artificial intelligence. Humanity becomes merely an object. We are powerless to stop it, only yielding and hoping not to be annihilated by this fierce force.

As for unclear pessimists, they are the awakeners. They believe everything has already been invented, and now we can only redistribute. At the center of this interpretation is power. Utilizing power to redistribute from the strong to the weak. There is no other way; capitalism has failed, and we can only freeze humanity, relying on the cold hands of bureaucracy to manage, trapping us in a predicament like paper straws (focusing on formal correctness while ignoring practicality and user experience).

Humans are the culprits. Nature is the victim. The poor are the victims. The winners are the perpetrators. The only way is for us all to lose equally. Only surface diversity and the promotion of ideological homogeneity remain, carried out by those for whom the rules do not fully apply, as they come to save us from original sin. The world has ended; stop using energy for progress because the only progress is miserable equality.

Now let's talk about those unclear optimists who say, "Things haven't developed this way, so we should go back and fix it." But how? Going backward is not a solution. The path to the future is unknown. Accepting nationalism? Sure, it applies to cultural cohesion, but the scale-shifting attributes of patriotic individuals may transform into a destructive machine.

Unclear optimists reject the homogeneity of globalism and the meaningless bureaucratic overburden but feel confused by the shift to new technological realities. It feels threatened and may tend to be narrow-minded. It does not know how to embrace technology as the matrix of social function.

Prohibiting social media? Is that like banning the printing press? Reform has already begun, and suppressing it will ultimately backfire. How to take control of one's affairs and strive toward a concrete future?

4. Clear Optimism of Cryptocurrency

If you have been in the cryptocurrency space for a while, you know it is a mess. Absolute chaos. But the energy of this chaos, noise, and misleading technological revolution comes from a strong desire to take control.

It starts with finance because the market is a machine for controlling resources. If we change the structure, we can direct the flow of value toward things the baby boomer generation dared not try. They like the status quo, but cryptocurrency does not. It wants change, but does not rely solely on protest. It is building. It is taking risks. It does not want to occupy Wall Street. It wants to liberate it.

Cryptocurrency is sunpunk. Cryptocurrency is about financial freedom, decentralized cities, and funding scientific experiments. Cryptocurrency is the disobedient mischievous child. On the surface, it is naive, but a decentralized, trustworthy neutral currency free from corruption and political bias is a significant technological revolution. It liberates funds. It ignores panic politics. Does anti-money laundering and KYC tyranny make the world safer, or the opposite?

Cryptocurrency creates a new class of assets that allows wealth to transfer from the existing generation. Housing becomes unaffordable, so cryptocurrency creates new games to bypass the bureaucratic machines that prevent young people from owning anything and progressing. It rejects "owning nothing but being happy." It wants to own everything, even if it suffers for it. But it wants to suffer on its own terms.

Yes, we release worthless NFTs. Yes, we push overvalued tokens to clueless retail investors. Yes, we bamboozle our lives with technical jargon. Yes, we fund completely useless things. Ultimately, this is innovation. No one promised it would be pleasant.

We occupy the digital world, set new rules, and start new games. It is not perfect, but we are executing a mission. Embracing individuals, finding new ways to do finance and business. These may be quirky experiments, but there is a vision, understanding that money is the ability to effect change.

We move slowly, one success at a time. Bitcoin. Ethereum. ICO. Uniswap. Solana. What's next? Bio.xyz? HairDAO? Most will fail in the charge. But a few that survive will have a global impact. We embrace the asymmetry of results.

Yes, cryptocurrency is the true frontier. You don't need a string of qualifications to make a mark in this world. A few lines of code can go a long way. Bad ideas get sent to the moon (and back). But good ideas do too. And we need more of those ideas.

So, if you are not in the cryptocurrency space, you should join us clowns, fraudsters, and pilgrims. There is a lot of money to be made and a lot of wealth to be lost.

We always need new talent to help us through tough times. We cannot rely on divine intervention to move forward; otherwise, we will become unclear optimists. We need new ideas and bold execution to maintain the clearest optimistic movement on this planet.

It is not the baby boomer generation buying Bitcoin and Ethereum ETFs, but those brave enough to enter the frontier, the coinless civilians who find inspiration, overcome all odds, and build the spirit that drives cryptocurrency forward.

This is the spiritual sequel to "Why My Hostility Towards Cryptocurrency Is Not Infinite" and "Mars Casino." If I haven't convinced you that cryptocurrency is a fruitful endeavor, you should read these two articles.