If we accept the premise that our lives are going to be largely mediated through digital platforms (assuming they aren’t already so), then it follows that digital literacy will be one of the most important skills underpinning our ability to live well in the future. In this regard, a serious engagement with crypto can be helpful—to hone the requisite instincts and sensibilities to not just survive but also thrive within this increasingly digitalised environment.

This may be an unconventional take, given the prevailing association of crypto with speculation and grift. Nevertheless, I can speak from personal experience: crypto has been the most important driving force in developing my digital literacy. Thanks to crypto, I now engage with digital technology in a more discerning and expansive manner. I believe you can too.

Firstly, crypto instils in its users the paramount importance of security.

After all, the blockchain is designed such that only the individual or entity holding the private key of a specific blockchain address has control of the digital assets tied to that address. While such sovereign ownership of assets come with perks—for one, you can’t get debanked from a blockchain—the stakes of self-custody are high. If you lose your private key, everything there will be lost. There’s no “forget password” button as a safety net, no administrator that you can appeal to. Your keys, your coins, your sole responsibility.

Securing what you own is therefore the most important thing you have to learn when engaging with crypto, all the more so as the environment surrounding crypto can be intensely adversarial. From malicious smart contracts to phishing attacks, scammers will keep coming up with cunning ways to steal your private keys or dupe you into making a compromised transaction. I myself have almost fallen for these tricks before.

At the same time, crypto is no stranger to the typical debauchery that money attracts. There will always be charlatans trying to get you to buy the shiniest coin or invest in a “revolutionary” product, only to treat you as exit liquidity. Criminals may also try to extort you in the physical world to get your private keys. The risks in crypto are certainly manifold—ranging from the technical to the psychological and also the physical—with you unfortunately as the single point of failure.

But this adversarial environment is not insurmountable. There are established best practices you can adopt to keep the risks to a minimum. Some of these are specific to crypto, such as storing your most valuable crypto assets in a cold wallet. Yet, many are also transferable to other digital contexts. For example, having the discipline to verify information you see on social media from multiple reputable sources or learning not to readily trust people you encounter online.

Indeed, the survival instincts you pick up in crypto can help you do the same far beyond crypto. This is especially so given the higher intensity of security threats and the more stringent precautions you need to take here in crypto. At the end of the day, if you can keep your crypto assets safe, you will also be well-equipped to keep yourself safe on other digital platforms.

Secondly, crypto encourages its users to peer under the hood.

At their most fundamental, the blockchain can be seen as a multi-layered system governing how data is stored, networked, validated and used. These system-level properties are what give crypto its special properties—decentralisation, permissionlessness, immutability and transparency—without which it will be difficult to appreciate the value proposition of crypto assets and applications.

Take Bitcoin, the OG cryptocurrency, for example. The value of Bitcoin doesn’t lie in the individual BTC tokens, but in Bitcoin as a system. BTC is valuable because Bitcoin pioneered a very special monetary system: one in which anyone can participate from anywhere, and whose rules are not controlled by a single entity. This system is the substance of Bitcoin, the reason why it is seen as the digital equivalent of gold.

But Bitcoin is only one of many cryptocurrencies today, each anchored by different protocols with distinct rules, technical affordances, tokenomics and social lore. A Layer 1 coin like ETH and a memecoin like HarryPotterObamaSonic10Inu cannot be any more different. Furthermore, cryptocurrencies are not the only digital assets that can be tokenised on a blockchain. Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) have shown that you can effectively tokenise almost anything, from digital slop to blue-chip fine art. Assessing the value of an NFT thus requires you to look closely at what is being tokenised, as well as the degree to which this underlying asset is stored or represented on the blockchain.[1]

Beyond the assets themselves, crypto applications also engender their own systems. Want to lend or borrow cryptocurrencies on DeFi applications like Aave? Then you need to understand how these applications calculate yield and manage collateralisation. Want to play a web3 game like the Parallel trading card game? Then you need to understand their in-game economics, such as the sources of demand and supply for the NFTs and cryptocurrencies used in gameplay.

In sum, if you really want to appreciate the value of crypto assets and applications, then you need to look beyond their surface and understand their underlying systems. These systems differentiate crypto from all other digital technologies, and it is these systems you need to be conversant with in order to engage seriously with crypto.

This sensibility in parsing systems in crypto—understanding how they work, the relationships between their component parts, their interactions with other systems—comes in handy outside of crypto too. Although non-crypto digital platforms like social media and consumer tech products tend to abstract away most complexity from users, it is still useful to be aware of their underlying systems where possible, in particular how they make money. By understanding why their systems are designed in a particular way, we can then be more mindful of the types of behaviour they incentivise and learn to cultivate a healthier relationship with them.

I would also add that understanding how crypto-native systems work makes it easier to understand the nuances of non-crypto systems. By comparing both sets of systems with one another, we can better appreciate their differences, using them as prompts to reflect on the affordances and constraints of either side. For instance, the logic of paying a small gas fee for a blockchain transaction may lead us to think about why similar transactions in our banking or fintech apps are free (or more expensive in cases like international transactions). Similarly, learning about the data storage constraints for our NFTs may lead us to consider the potential ephemerality of our personal data or content on centralised platforms like Instagram or Spotify.

Indeed, the systems thinking and practice honed through crypto can make us more astute users of digital technology. Here in crypto, we are conditioned not to take any digital technology for granted. After all, this is where we learn that everything ultimately comes with a price.

Thirdly (and finally), crypto is great for nurturing an open mind towards digital technology.

Given that crypto-native systems are built on fundamentally different assumptions from other existing digital platforms, they tend to lie outside the Overton window, perceived as radical and perhaps even unthinkable.

I remembered being completely mindblown when I first learnt that you could swap tokens without an intermediary on a decentralised exchange like Uniswap. At a larger scale, the idea of a decentralised autonomous organisation (DAO), entities in which individuals can pool resources to do things together without knowing each other, seemed preposterous. How about the notion of a permissionless digital economy governed by nothing other than code? Complete science fiction!

Nevertheless, engaging with crypto has since helped to soften my cognitive inertia. I find that crypto is effective at compelling us to interrogate our priors, breaking us out from the assumption that the way things work now is the only way they can work. By offering a viable starting point built on a different technological foundation, crypto enables us to consider novel yet credible economic and cultural possibilities outside of the current paradigm.

What if our digital identities and social graphs actually belong to us, and we can decide to port them over to the platforms of our choosing? What if those of us who have contributed to the training of an AI model can be remunerated proportionally and programmatically from the economic value generated by that model? What if artists can create entirely new forms of art, in which the network is the canvas and our collective actions on that network are the brushstrokes? These are just some of the exciting possibilities that crypto has opened up across various fields of human endeavour, and I’m sure many more are coming.

A related and underappreciated facet of crypto is that it also provides an expansive surface area for other new technologies to interact with it. Since the blockchain functions primarily as a settlement layer where transactions, ownership data, and programming instructions can be reliably stored and referred to, crypto becomes a natural meeting point for these technologies.

For example, alternative assets like carbon credits and intellectual property rights can benefit from the transparency and composability if they are tokenised on a blockchain, not to mention the enhanced tradability and access to liquidity. AI would be another big one, with crypto being the most obvious infrastructure for autonomous agents to make economic transactions with each other in a secure and verifiable way. In addition, given crypto’s ideological predisposition to decentralisation and protecting an individual’s freedom to transact, nascent privacy-preserving technologies like zero-knowledge proofs and fully-homomorphic encryption (FHE) are most likely to be developed and scaled with crypto rails as well.

By engaging seriously with crypto then, you’ll have ample opportunities to also engage with these other complementary technologies. Crypto is certainly a multidisciplinary endeavour—one that can push you to be at the bleeding edge of new digital possibilities if you’re open to it.

This essay began with a simple goal: to conceive of an alternative narrative to crypto’s rather sullied reputation in the mainstream. Notwithstanding its speculative side, I believe crypto is still a credible technology. One major reason why is because the affordances and constraints in crypto do compel us to take digital technology even more seriously. Crypto offers a practical hands-on crash course to navigate our increasingly high-stakes digital world today. In short, crypto goes hand in hand with digital literacy.

Indeed, I find that those who engage the most seriously with crypto are often some of the most adept at navigating complex online contexts. These folks are conditioned to secure their assets well in a highly adversarial environment. They instinctively think in terms of protocols or systems when confronting digital technology, understanding intuitively how the design of their underlying systems can shape their downstream uses. They also tend to have the most open minds, and are readily positioned to take advantage of new technologies.

I believe we can learn something from them. As we hurtle towards an increasingly digitalised future together, we will find that the ground will continue to shift beneath our feet. This is just the condition of the digital, where nothing is stable. The stakes here will only get higher, and we will need all the help we can get, including and especially from crypto.

Disclaimer: Nothing in this essay constitutes investment advice. Please do your own research or consult your own advisers concerning any potential investment decision.

Credits: The header image of this essay is a crop of an artwork titled “20ETH MOSS WEI:BTC”, part of a larger series of works by Nahiko titled “Bit Rot”. Each piece in this collection is visually depicted by a fictional bank note representing a specific amount of cryptocurrency and fronted by an influential figure from either the financial or crypto sectors. However, each bank note is actually a mosaic upon closer inspection, made up of hundreds of thousands of NFTs that have been released under the CC0 licence. The core artistic gesture here is that as the component NFTs become inaccessible over time due to link rot, the artworks will gradually decay. I thought that the work was a witty commentary that challenges the common misconception that NFTs are immutable. It certainly prompts us to consider more carefully the relationship between NFTs and the media they are supposed to represent.

The full work is displayed below and it is currently in my personal digital art collection.

https://opensea.io/assets/ethereum/0x9f2390fd7b8e9a0721de87bb1f794677b0c7cc6f/173

Footnotes:

[1] Most NFTs have some external dependencies. They tend to be tokens containing a link to a media file stored somewhere outside of the blockchain, such as on a decentralised data storage platform like IPFS, or worse, a private server, which is highly susceptible to link rot.

If we accept the premise that our lives are going to be largely mediated through digital platforms (assuming they aren’t already so), then it follows that digital literacy will be one of the most important skills underpinning our ability to live well in the future. In this regard, a serious engagement with crypto can be helpful—to hone the requisite instincts and sensibilities to not just survive but also thrive within this increasingly digitalised environment.

This may be an unconventional take, given the prevailing association of crypto with speculation and grift. Nevertheless, I can speak from personal experience: crypto has been the most important driving force in developing my digital literacy. Thanks to crypto, I now engage with digital technology in a more discerning and expansive manner. I believe you can too.

Firstly, crypto instils in its users the paramount importance of security.

After all, the blockchain is designed such that only the individual or entity holding the private key of a specific blockchain address has control of the digital assets tied to that address. While such sovereign ownership of assets come with perks—for one, you can’t get debanked from a blockchain—the stakes of self-custody are high. If you lose your private key, everything there will be lost. There’s no “forget password” button as a safety net, no administrator that you can appeal to. Your keys, your coins, your sole responsibility.

Securing what you own is therefore the most important thing you have to learn when engaging with crypto, all the more so as the environment surrounding crypto can be intensely adversarial. From malicious smart contracts to phishing attacks, scammers will keep coming up with cunning ways to steal your private keys or dupe you into making a compromised transaction. I myself have almost fallen for these tricks before.

At the same time, crypto is no stranger to the typical debauchery that money attracts. There will always be charlatans trying to get you to buy the shiniest coin or invest in a “revolutionary” product, only to treat you as exit liquidity. Criminals may also try to extort you in the physical world to get your private keys. The risks in crypto are certainly manifold—ranging from the technical to the psychological and also the physical—with you unfortunately as the single point of failure.

But this adversarial environment is not insurmountable. There are established best practices you can adopt to keep the risks to a minimum. Some of these are specific to crypto, such as storing your most valuable crypto assets in a cold wallet. Yet, many are also transferable to other digital contexts. For example, having the discipline to verify information you see on social media from multiple reputable sources or learning not to readily trust people you encounter online.

Indeed, the survival instincts you pick up in crypto can help you do the same far beyond crypto. This is especially so given the higher intensity of security threats and the more stringent precautions you need to take here in crypto. At the end of the day, if you can keep your crypto assets safe, you will also be well-equipped to keep yourself safe on other digital platforms.

Secondly, crypto encourages its users to peer under the hood.

At their most fundamental, the blockchain can be seen as a multi-layered system governing how data is stored, networked, validated and used. These system-level properties are what give crypto its special properties—decentralisation, permissionlessness, immutability and transparency—without which it will be difficult to appreciate the value proposition of crypto assets and applications.

Take Bitcoin, the OG cryptocurrency, for example. The value of Bitcoin doesn’t lie in the individual BTC tokens, but in Bitcoin as a system. BTC is valuable because Bitcoin pioneered a very special monetary system: one in which anyone can participate from anywhere, and whose rules are not controlled by a single entity. This system is the substance of Bitcoin, the reason why it is seen as the digital equivalent of gold.

But Bitcoin is only one of many cryptocurrencies today, each anchored by different protocols with distinct rules, technical affordances, tokenomics and social lore. A Layer 1 coin like ETH and a memecoin like HarryPotterObamaSonic10Inu cannot be any more different. Furthermore, cryptocurrencies are not the only digital assets that can be tokenised on a blockchain. Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) have shown that you can effectively tokenise almost anything, from digital slop to blue-chip fine art. Assessing the value of an NFT thus requires you to look closely at what is being tokenised, as well as the degree to which this underlying asset is stored or represented on the blockchain.[1]

Beyond the assets themselves, crypto applications also engender their own systems. Want to lend or borrow cryptocurrencies on DeFi applications like Aave? Then you need to understand how these applications calculate yield and manage collateralisation. Want to play a web3 game like the Parallel trading card game? Then you need to understand their in-game economics, such as the sources of demand and supply for the NFTs and cryptocurrencies used in gameplay.

In sum, if you really want to appreciate the value of crypto assets and applications, then you need to look beyond their surface and understand their underlying systems. These systems differentiate crypto from all other digital technologies, and it is these systems you need to be conversant with in order to engage seriously with crypto.

This sensibility in parsing systems in crypto—understanding how they work, the relationships between their component parts, their interactions with other systems—comes in handy outside of crypto too. Although non-crypto digital platforms like social media and consumer tech products tend to abstract away most complexity from users, it is still useful to be aware of their underlying systems where possible, in particular how they make money. By understanding why their systems are designed in a particular way, we can then be more mindful of the types of behaviour they incentivise and learn to cultivate a healthier relationship with them.

I would also add that understanding how crypto-native systems work makes it easier to understand the nuances of non-crypto systems. By comparing both sets of systems with one another, we can better appreciate their differences, using them as prompts to reflect on the affordances and constraints of either side. For instance, the logic of paying a small gas fee for a blockchain transaction may lead us to think about why similar transactions in our banking or fintech apps are free (or more expensive in cases like international transactions). Similarly, learning about the data storage constraints for our NFTs may lead us to consider the potential ephemerality of our personal data or content on centralised platforms like Instagram or Spotify.

Indeed, the systems thinking and practice honed through crypto can make us more astute users of digital technology. Here in crypto, we are conditioned not to take any digital technology for granted. After all, this is where we learn that everything ultimately comes with a price.

Thirdly (and finally), crypto is great for nurturing an open mind towards digital technology.

Given that crypto-native systems are built on fundamentally different assumptions from other existing digital platforms, they tend to lie outside the Overton window, perceived as radical and perhaps even unthinkable.

I remembered being completely mindblown when I first learnt that you could swap tokens without an intermediary on a decentralised exchange like Uniswap. At a larger scale, the idea of a decentralised autonomous organisation (DAO), entities in which individuals can pool resources to do things together without knowing each other, seemed preposterous. How about the notion of a permissionless digital economy governed by nothing other than code? Complete science fiction!

Nevertheless, engaging with crypto has since helped to soften my cognitive inertia. I find that crypto is effective at compelling us to interrogate our priors, breaking us out from the assumption that the way things work now is the only way they can work. By offering a viable starting point built on a different technological foundation, crypto enables us to consider novel yet credible economic and cultural possibilities outside of the current paradigm.

What if our digital identities and social graphs actually belong to us, and we can decide to port them over to the platforms of our choosing? What if those of us who have contributed to the training of an AI model can be remunerated proportionally and programmatically from the economic value generated by that model? What if artists can create entirely new forms of art, in which the network is the canvas and our collective actions on that network are the brushstrokes? These are just some of the exciting possibilities that crypto has opened up across various fields of human endeavour, and I’m sure many more are coming.

A related and underappreciated facet of crypto is that it also provides an expansive surface area for other new technologies to interact with it. Since the blockchain functions primarily as a settlement layer where transactions, ownership data, and programming instructions can be reliably stored and referred to, crypto becomes a natural meeting point for these technologies.

For example, alternative assets like carbon credits and intellectual property rights can benefit from the transparency and composability if they are tokenised on a blockchain, not to mention the enhanced tradability and access to liquidity. AI would be another big one, with crypto being the most obvious infrastructure for autonomous agents to make economic transactions with each other in a secure and verifiable way. In addition, given crypto’s ideological predisposition to decentralisation and protecting an individual’s freedom to transact, nascent privacy-preserving technologies like zero-knowledge proofs and fully-homomorphic encryption (FHE) are most likely to be developed and scaled with crypto rails as well.

By engaging seriously with crypto then, you’ll have ample opportunities to also engage with these other complementary technologies. Crypto is certainly a multidisciplinary endeavour—one that can push you to be at the bleeding edge of new digital possibilities if you’re open to it.

This essay began with a simple goal: to conceive of an alternative narrative to crypto’s rather sullied reputation in the mainstream. Notwithstanding its speculative side, I believe crypto is still a credible technology. One major reason why is because the affordances and constraints in crypto do compel us to take digital technology even more seriously. Crypto offers a practical hands-on crash course to navigate our increasingly high-stakes digital world today. In short, crypto goes hand in hand with digital literacy.

Indeed, I find that those who engage the most seriously with crypto are often some of the most adept at navigating complex online contexts. These folks are conditioned to secure their assets well in a highly adversarial environment. They instinctively think in terms of protocols or systems when confronting digital technology, understanding intuitively how the design of their underlying systems can shape their downstream uses. They also tend to have the most open minds, and are readily positioned to take advantage of new technologies.

I believe we can learn something from them. As we hurtle towards an increasingly digitalised future together, we will find that the ground will continue to shift beneath our feet. This is just the condition of the digital, where nothing is stable. The stakes here will only get higher, and we will need all the help we can get, including and especially from crypto.

Disclaimer: Nothing in this essay constitutes investment advice. Please do your own research or consult your own advisers concerning any potential investment decision.

Credits: The header image of this essay is a crop of an artwork titled “20ETH MOSS WEI:BTC”, part of a larger series of works by Nahiko titled “Bit Rot”. Each piece in this collection is visually depicted by a fictional bank note representing a specific amount of cryptocurrency and fronted by an influential figure from either the financial or crypto sectors. However, each bank note is actually a mosaic upon closer inspection, made up of hundreds of thousands of NFTs that have been released under the CC0 licence. The core artistic gesture here is that as the component NFTs become inaccessible over time due to link rot, the artworks will gradually decay. I thought that the work was a witty commentary that challenges the common misconception that NFTs are immutable. It certainly prompts us to consider more carefully the relationship between NFTs and the media they are supposed to represent.

The full work is displayed below and it is currently in my personal digital art collection.

https://opensea.io/assets/ethereum/0x9f2390fd7b8e9a0721de87bb1f794677b0c7cc6f/173

Footnotes:

[1] Most NFTs have some external dependencies. They tend to be tokens containing a link to a media file stored somewhere outside of the blockchain, such as on a decentralised data storage platform like IPFS, or worse, a private server, which is highly susceptible to link rot.