“Although we live in a world of a limited number of atoms, there are virtually infinite ways to arrange those atoms.”

– Marian Tupy & Gale Pooley

If you enjoyed this article, do consider following me on Twitter.

It is hard to be optimistic about crypto. I’ve watched lots of people cycle through this industry.

Over time, I’ve started sorting folks into three buckets:

1. Jaded Pessimists

Your Jaded Pessimists are the industry tourists who are, well, not happy. These guys swallowed whole the “fiat bad, crypto gud” ideology on day one, but now flinch at every new L1 and roll their eyes at memecoins. They’re probably still holding an NFT from back in the day because of “community”. If you prod these guys enough, they’ll begrudgingly concede that stablecoins matter, but only because TradFi – not the degenerate crypto-natives – will make them useful.

1. Salarychain Surfers

The Salarychain Surfers are just happy to have a job. The Surfers are blissfully delta-neutral on ideology; they don’t need crypto to save the world, they need it to pay on the 1st. So if crypto puts food on the table, they are here for the ride. Traders, airdrop farmers, ambitious careerists live here.

1. Eternal Optimists

Then you have the Eternal Optimists. These are your technologists and venture capitalists who believe prediction markets, MetaDAO and <insert new L1 that Paradigm funded> is the future of finance. Tell them “it’s all a scam,” and they’ll be more than happy to speed-run the hoary tropes of how the early internet was also all a scam in under 90 seconds.

Whichever camp you fall into, it’s worth pondering why crypto optimism is hard.

The rapid scams and blowups play an obvious part here, and the mainstream media doesn’t do any favors, but I think there’s a simpler explanation for it:

Crypto is inherently financial. Finance is boring at best, and unethical at worst (unless you’re winning the lottery, that is).

But blockchains lean financial by design. A blockchain is a ledger of who-owns-what, who-paid-whom, and when it settles. That’s just property rights. And once people have property rights, investment incentives kick in.

That’s not a “financebro” quirk.

The poor man does the same thing when he saves a little each week to buy a second-hand motorbike for deliveries – sacrificing today’s consumption for tomorrow’s cash flow. But that’s because he knows what he sets aside retains its value tomorrow. Property rights underlie that behavior. They underwrite any economy.

The problem is crypto has a tendency to speedrun that economic logic to the extremes, turning off many in the process.

To the Pessimists, the latest CT rave amounts to more financial engineering layered on top of more financial engineering, whether it’s memecoins, DATs or prediction markets.

A recently viral piece on “Rejecting Crypto Pessimism” offers compelling reasons to be proud of the industry’s achievements, yet the list of reasons are framed in a rhetoric that appeals largely to financebros. It’s not wrong, but that’s more a rallying cry for the already-converts i.e. the Eternal Optimists, rather than an appeal to the Jaded Pessimists.

The Pessimist wants tangible value. They wanted to believe that Axie Infinity was uplifting poor Filipinos. They wanted Gitcoin’s “RegenFi” so hard to succeed in 2022. At minimum, they want a crypto neobank card they can swipe. They want something that resonates with their values – another perps DEX isn’t it.

I think the Pessimists miss the big picture, but it’s not hard to empathize with the Pessimist outlook.

How can you train your brain toward optimism ? Having interviewed hundreds of people as a reporter, one consistent trait among Optimists is being able to take a big picture view of the space.

That is, I think, the trick to being optimistic – being able to zoom out (no, not on a price chart).

Yes, crypto demand is driven largely by speculative demand. But is that a far cry from traditional financial systems?

Yes, it is ethically objectionable that gamblers gamble on memecoins, but is that different from state-sponsored lotteries?

Yes, many ICOs are scammy, but are all ICOs bad? (Ethereum was born from an ICO)

If the answer is “no” or “unsure” to any of the above, then maybe your lens is too tight on the bad apples.

For the Optimists, shit happens, but they can critique without having the criticism degenerate into blanket condemnation of the industry.

That kind of critical thinking is difficult. That takes mental discipline: updating priors, entertaining counterfactuals, and admitting how much we don’t know.

To put it simply, admit there’s a lot you don’t know, and be willing to learn.

To the Pessimists, you don’t need to advance the moral mission of crypto. Try finding joy in small puzzles. What failure taught you something real this week? How is this scam similar to scams in other industries? What product feels boring in a good way?

Tune down the headline-chasing outrage of the media. Follow builders or communities you trust. You’ll find that the industry isn’t so irredeemable after all.

See you next week on Muff Taicho.

“Although we live in a world of a limited number of atoms, there are virtually infinite ways to arrange those atoms.”

– Marian Tupy & Gale Pooley

If you enjoyed this article, do consider following me on Twitter.

It is hard to be optimistic about crypto. I’ve watched lots of people cycle through this industry.

Over time, I’ve started sorting folks into three buckets:

1. Jaded Pessimists

Your Jaded Pessimists are the industry tourists who are, well, not happy. These guys swallowed whole the “fiat bad, crypto gud” ideology on day one, but now flinch at every new L1 and roll their eyes at memecoins. They’re probably still holding an NFT from back in the day because of “community”. If you prod these guys enough, they’ll begrudgingly concede that stablecoins matter, but only because TradFi – not the degenerate crypto-natives – will make them useful.

1. Salarychain Surfers

The Salarychain Surfers are just happy to have a job. The Surfers are blissfully delta-neutral on ideology; they don’t need crypto to save the world, they need it to pay on the 1st. So if crypto puts food on the table, they are here for the ride. Traders, airdrop farmers, ambitious careerists live here.

1. Eternal Optimists

Then you have the Eternal Optimists. These are your technologists and venture capitalists who believe prediction markets, MetaDAO and <insert new L1 that Paradigm funded> is the future of finance. Tell them “it’s all a scam,” and they’ll be more than happy to speed-run the hoary tropes of how the early internet was also all a scam in under 90 seconds.

Whichever camp you fall into, it’s worth pondering why crypto optimism is hard.

The rapid scams and blowups play an obvious part here, and the mainstream media doesn’t do any favors, but I think there’s a simpler explanation for it:

Crypto is inherently financial. Finance is boring at best, and unethical at worst (unless you’re winning the lottery, that is).

But blockchains lean financial by design. A blockchain is a ledger of who-owns-what, who-paid-whom, and when it settles. That’s just property rights. And once people have property rights, investment incentives kick in.

That’s not a “financebro” quirk.

The poor man does the same thing when he saves a little each week to buy a second-hand motorbike for deliveries – sacrificing today’s consumption for tomorrow’s cash flow. But that’s because he knows what he sets aside retains its value tomorrow. Property rights underlie that behavior. They underwrite any economy.

The problem is crypto has a tendency to speedrun that economic logic to the extremes, turning off many in the process.

To the Pessimists, the latest CT rave amounts to more financial engineering layered on top of more financial engineering, whether it’s memecoins, DATs or prediction markets.

A recently viral piece on “Rejecting Crypto Pessimism” offers compelling reasons to be proud of the industry’s achievements, yet the list of reasons are framed in a rhetoric that appeals largely to financebros. It’s not wrong, but that’s more a rallying cry for the already-converts i.e. the Eternal Optimists, rather than an appeal to the Jaded Pessimists.

The Pessimist wants tangible value. They wanted to believe that Axie Infinity was uplifting poor Filipinos. They wanted Gitcoin’s “RegenFi” so hard to succeed in 2022. At minimum, they want a crypto neobank card they can swipe. They want something that resonates with their values – another perps DEX isn’t it.

I think the Pessimists miss the big picture, but it’s not hard to empathize with the Pessimist outlook.

How can you train your brain toward optimism ? Having interviewed hundreds of people as a reporter, one consistent trait among Optimists is being able to take a big picture view of the space.

That is, I think, the trick to being optimistic – being able to zoom out (no, not on a price chart).

Yes, crypto demand is driven largely by speculative demand. But is that a far cry from traditional financial systems?

Yes, it is ethically objectionable that gamblers gamble on memecoins, but is that different from state-sponsored lotteries?

Yes, many ICOs are scammy, but are all ICOs bad? (Ethereum was born from an ICO)

If the answer is “no” or “unsure” to any of the above, then maybe your lens is too tight on the bad apples.

For the Optimists, shit happens, but they can critique without having the criticism degenerate into blanket condemnation of the industry.

That kind of critical thinking is difficult. That takes mental discipline: updating priors, entertaining counterfactuals, and admitting how much we don’t know.

To put it simply, admit there’s a lot you don’t know, and be willing to learn.

To the Pessimists, you don’t need to advance the moral mission of crypto. Try finding joy in small puzzles. What failure taught you something real this week? How is this scam similar to scams in other industries? What product feels boring in a good way?

Tune down the headline-chasing outrage of the media. Follow builders or communities you trust. You’ll find that the industry isn’t so irredeemable after all.

See you next week on Muff Taicho.