Title: "The Optimistic Crypto Pitch"
Author: Matti, Zee Prime Capital
Translator: 0x26
Editor's Note: The development of cryptocurrency has entered deep waters, and the importance of cultural and social attributes has been further elevated. Technology has almost become an insurmountable moat, and the criticism faced by new terms and narratives far outweighs the support.
Faced with these sudden changes, many seasoned players feel uncomfortable, even shouting that cryptocurrency is "finished." But as community members say, "Belief is the only way out, that's why few people can succeed." Matti's article "The Optimistic Crypto Pitch" explains why we can still believe in cryptocurrency. The full text of the article is as follows, with the translation by Luodong:
Cryptocurrency has different definitions in the eyes of many people: some think of it as a luxury for geeks, some see it as currency anarchism, and some even call it a ridiculous scam. The cryptocurrency industry today has moved far away from its original libertarian dream and is no longer just a small circle of Satoshi Nakamoto and a few cypherpunk computer scientists. Cryptocurrency has gone through the process of commercialization and has become more diverse in terms of ideology.
In fact, the biggest enemy of cryptocurrency is not those who are skeptical, but those who dare to tamper with the "bible." Bitcoin supporters do not like Ethereum's believers, and Ethereum's believers do not like Solana's advocates. I am exaggerating here for a reason. It is often the least tolerant minority that is the loudest. But the conflict is obvious—not a struggle between insiders and outsiders, but a struggle between different currencies.
Talking about conflict may not sound very optimistic, but it only shows how this subculture imitates past (and present) religious conflicts. If cryptocurrency is a religion, it is a religion centered on currency, finance, and business revolution. The gods here are interchangeable, the narratives are flexible, and financial expectations are scalable. Cryptocurrency replaces "we believe in God" with "we believe in our currency."
Optimism
The optimism I mentioned refers to a person understanding their potential to change the world and accepting it, drawing strength from their innate nature.
Optimists tend to experiment and take risks for themselves. They love freedom and detest tyranny. But when optimists detest something, they pay the price. They make bets because they know, as Seneca wrote, "When people can hate without risk, their stupidity is easily aroused, and the motive to strengthen hatred arises by itself."
Optimists do not feel the need to rule on behalf of others; they understand that they often make mistakes but still try. They seize the opportunity to explore, create, and rebuild the world in their own image. Optimists understand that expanding knowledge is the lifeline of life, allowing their descendants to discard old ideas and follow new thoughts.
Optimists understand that resources are not limitations but opportunities, as ideas empower resources and utilize the surrounding environment for themselves. Optimists embrace change and see it as a necessary condition for progress.
How does this optimism relate to the promotion of cryptocurrency? Initially, a person who could envision a world where governments no longer control monetary affairs had deeply optimistic origins for cryptocurrency.
Not because governments are evil, but because they are prone to corruption. And not because people are evil. The longer institutions govern communities, the easier it is for them to grasp power. Over time, they become less relevant, dogmatically stagnant 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 communities they govern.
The original idea of cryptocurrency—Bitcoin—was about reducing dependence on power, not relying on the monopoly of violence, but on immutable code in the network. "A foolish dream." However, it succeeded. This optimistic experiment is now worth trillions of dollars. Today, it's not just Bitcoin, but much more.
Crypto
The fluctuations of cryptocurrency are very apparent. The higher it rises, the more painful the fall. Some natural laws also apply 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 fluctuations. They also cannot reconcile whether VC coins appear in the market with crazy valuations before or after releasing the minimum viable product.
Investors jump from one narrative to another, funding things that are either unlikely to succeed, unable to succeed, or even if successful, no one will use. Most things will go to zero, completely to zero. That's okay. "Wait, I'm here to promote optimistic cryptocurrency."
Media is information. Meme coins are a medium, cryptocurrency is a medium, and human behavior unfolds in new ways under the impetus of new technology. Going to zero is part of the game.
Even going to zero is okay, because cryptocurrency is still the most optimistic technological movement in the world. Every technological and cultural revolution triggers exploitation precisely because it is revolutionary. This opens up opportunities for asymmetric information, and people quickly (mis)use these opportunities for their own gain.
But ultimately, in cryptocurrency, people are beginning to address problems, attempting to solve governance issues (despite failing), trying to build a new internet, trusted neutral payment channels, various interesting use cases for new physical infrastructure, funding research projects that cannot be funded elsewhere, busy with cultural monetization, achieving financial freedom before releasing a product used by thousands of users, establishing a casino as an alternative financial product, attempting to build new cities, and challenging death. Most of these are likely misleading. But it shows the great spirit that cryptocurrency offers.
Cryptocurrency is the Wild West meets Las Vegas, a frontier where one can get rich overnight, but more likely to lose all wealth, be scammed by sex workers. It's a place where dreams come true, where sieges are won, or wealth is lost in gambling, and conflicts happen every day.
Pessimists and Optimists
For years, I have carried Peter Thiel's simplified 2x2 framework of optimism and pessimism in my mind. When you have a hammer (everything looks like a nail to you), Thiel distinguishes between explicit and implicit pessimism and optimism.
He says, "If you view the future as definite, then understanding and shaping it in advance makes sense… If you expect an uncertain future ruled by randomness, you will give up trying to master it."
Implicit pessimists "react to events, hoping things won't get worse… Implicit pessimists cannot know whether the inevitable decline will be fast or slow, catastrophic or gradual. They can only wait for it to happen."
Explicit pessimists "are obsessed with how things will get worse… They believe the future is foreseeable, but because it will be bleak, they must prepare for it."
Implicit optimists see a better future but do not know how to achieve it. Finally, explicit optimists see an improved future, so they plan and work to achieve it. This is a simplified version of the narrative on my Twitter:
I have framed politics and technology as the vertical boundary between explicit and implicit. This is because politics is not about creating wealth but about governance and distribution. At best, good politics promotes technology and entrepreneurship. But it does not create the future itself. Technology does. It is the substrate of social development, the network for exchanging information among humans.
The horizontal boundary is about the role of the individual versus the collective. Optimists emphasize the foundation mentioned above. It is more about bottom-up change and robustness through decentralization. Pessimists believe the world is fragile and want to rely on top-down control to maintain it. Only through their power can they solve problems to prevent things from getting worse.
Let's start with Explicit Pessimism of AI Narratives. This is explicit because it relies on a technological paradigm. Why pessimism? At the center of this narrative is the machine, as a greater existence than humans themselves. This is a new interpretation of God, through chatbots conversing with mortals. Algorithms rule everything. We are at the mercy of this technology.
Either it is inevitable death brought about by this powerful existence, or perhaps we can study the aligned "bible" (consistent principles). AI as "Abraham's interpretation (supreme existence)" rather than artificial intelligence. Humans have become mere objects. We are powerless, unable to stop it, only able to submit and hope not to be annihilated by this fierce force.
As for the Implicit Pessimists, they are the awakened. They believe everything has been invented, and now we can only redistribute. At the center of this interpretation is power. Using power to distribute from the strong to the weak. There is no other way, capitalism has failed, and we can only freeze humanity, relying on bureaucratic cold hands to manage, leaving us in a troubled state like a paper straw (emphasizing formal correctness while neglecting practicality and user experience).
Humans are the culprits. Nature is the victim. The poor are victims. The winners are perpetrators. The only way is for all of us to lose equally. Only the promotion of surface diversity and ideological homogeneity remains, to be completed by those whose rules do not fully apply, as they are here to save us from original sin. The world has ended, ceasing to use energy for progress, because the only progress is miserable equality.
Now, let's talk about the Implicit Optimists who say, "Things didn't turn out this way, so we should go back and fix it." But how? Going back is not the solution. The future path is unknown. Embrace nationalism? It may apply to cultural cohesion, but the scale-changing properties of patriotic individuals may transform into a machine of destruction.
Implicit optimists reject the homogeneity of globalism and the burdensome bureaucracy, but are confused by the transformation of new technological realities. It feels threatened and may tend towards narrow-mindedness. It does not know how to accept technology as the functional matrix of society.
Ban social media? Is this the same as banning printing presses? Reform has begun, suppressing it will ultimately backfire. How to control one's own affairs and strive towards a concrete future?
Explicit Optimism of Cryptocurrency
If you've been in the cryptocurrency space for a while, you know it's a mess. Absolute chaos. But this chaos, noise, and the energy of the misleading technological revolution are due to a strong desire to take control of oneself.
It starts with finance, as the market is a machine that controls resources. If we change the structure, we can direct value flow towards things the baby boomer generation dared not attempt. They like the status quo, but cryptocurrency does not. It wants change, but not just through protest. It's in the construction phase. It takes risks. It doesn't want to occupy Wall Street. It wants to liberate it.
Cryptocurrency is solar punk. It's about financial freedom, decentralized cities, and funding scientific experiments. Cryptocurrency is the disobedient child. Naive on the surface, but decentralized, trustworthy, neutral currency without corruption and political bias is a major technological revolution. It frees up funds. It ignores panic politics. Has the tyranny of anti-money laundering and KYC made the world safer, or the opposite?
Cryptocurrency has created a new class of assets that allow wealth to transfer from the current generation. Housing has become unaffordable, so cryptocurrency has created a new game to bypass the bureaucratic machine that prevents young people from owning anything and progressing. It rejects "own nothing and be happy." It wants to have everything, even if it means suffering. But suffering on its own terms.
Yes, we release NFTs with no value. Yes, we push overvalued tokens to clueless retail investors. Yes, we use technical jargon to confuse our lives. Yes, we fund completely useless things. In the end, this is innovation. No one promised it would be pleasant.
We have occupied the digital world, set new rules, and started a new game. It's not perfect, but we are on a mission. Embrace individuality, find new ways to conduct finance and business. These may be quirky experiments, but there is a vision, understanding that money is the power of change.
We move forward slowly, one success at a time. Bitcoin. Ethereum. ICOs. Uniswap. Solana. What's next? Bio.xyz? HairDAO? Most will fail in the attempts to charge forward. But the few that survive will have a global impact. We embrace the asymmetry of outcomes.
Yes, cryptocurrency is the real 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 are sent to the moon (and back). But good ideas too. And we need more of those.
So, if you're not in the cryptocurrency space, you should join us clowns, scammers, and pilgrims. There's a lot of money to be made, a lot of wealth to be lost.
We always need new talent to help us through. We can't rely on divine intervention to move forward, or we'll become implicit optimists. We need new ideas and bold execution to maintain the most explicit optimistic movement on this planet.
It's not the baby boomer generation buying Bitcoin and Ethereum ETFs, but those coinless civilians who dare to enter the frontier, find inspiration, overcome obstacles, and build the spirit that drives cryptocurrency forward.
This is a sequel to "Why I'm Less Than Infinitely Hostile to Cryptocurrency" and "Mars Casino". If I haven't convinced you that cryptocurrency is a rewarding venture, you should read these two articles.
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