most things worth having tend to break when you try to scale them religion functioned as a scaling layer for trust and meaning when civilisations moved from <= 150-person tribes by: - compressing ethics into stories the brain could carry - externalising conscience into gods, laws and rituals - creating shared values between strangers crypto on the other hand scales coordination without scaling virtue, which means that default behaviour is: - extractive - transactional - short-term not because people are bad BUT because nothing within the system rewards non-transactional behaviour at scale