Pia and the idealism of dispersed attention, focusing directly on application and usage. Some developers belittle their token holders and their dirty love for making money. There are also developers who belittle pragmatic users and their dirty desire to use centralized solutions when it’s more convenient for them.
But I believe there’s an opportunity to improve understanding between these four groups, with each side understanding that it ultimately relies on the other three groups, striving to limit their own excessive behavior, and realizing that their dreams are not as far-fetched as they imagine in many cases. I think this is a practical form of peace that is actually achievable, whether within the “crypto space” or between neighboring communities that share the same values.
The wonderful thing about the global nature of cryptocurrencies is that it provides me with a window to understand various fascinating cultures and subcultures around the world and how they interact with the crypto world.
I still remember my first visit to China in 2014, where I saw all the signs of brightness and hope: exchanges expanding to hundreds of employees, even faster than in the United States, large-scale GPU and later ASIC mining pools, and projects with millions of users. Meanwhile, Silicon Valley and Europe have long been the main engines of idealism in this field, with two distinctly different styles. Ethereum’s development has been effectively headquartered in Berlin from the very beginning, where many early ideas on how to use Ethereum for non-financial applications emerged within Europe’s open-source culture.
Ethereum’s chart and the two proposed non-blockchain sister protocols, Whisper and Swarm, were used by Gavin Wood in many of his early speeches.
Silicon Valley (of course, I mean the entire San Francisco Bay Area) has been another breeding ground for early cryptocurrency interest, mixing various ideologies such as rationalism, effective altruism, and transhumanism. In the 2010s, these ideas were new and they felt “adjacent to crypto”: many people interested in them were also interested in crypto.
Elsewhere, the topic of enabling regular businesses to use cryptocurrencies for payments is popular. In various parts of the world, people will find that Bitcoin is accepted, even including Japanese servers receiving Bitcoin as tips:
Since then, these communities have undergone many changes. In addition to other broader challenges, China has experienced multiple crackdowns on cryptocurrencies, leading Singapore to become a new home for many developers. Silicon Valley has had internal divisions: rationalists and AI developers, essentially different factions of the same team, until Scott Alexander was doxxed by The New York Times in 2020 and became an independent faction on the default path of AI optimism and pessimism. Ethereum’s regional composition has undergone significant changes, especially during the introduction of a new team during the proof-of-stake period in 2018, although it was achieved more through adding new teams than through the demise of old teams. Deaths, births, and rebirths.
There are many other communities worth mentioning.
When I visited Taiwan for the first time in 2016 and 2017, what impressed me the most was the combination of self-organization abilities and the willingness to learn from the people there. Whenever I write documents or blog posts, I often find that within a day, a study club will independently form and excitedly annotate every paragraph of the post on Google Docs. Recently, members of Taiwan’s digital affairs department were equally excited about Glen Weyl’s ideas on digital democracy and “plurality” and quickly released a full mind map of the field on their Twitter account (including many Ethereum applications).
Related reading:
Highlights of Plurality Talk》Vitalik: Traditional electoral systems are prone to abandonment, and quadratic voting can improve democracy
Paul Graham once wrote about how each city conveys an information: in New York, “you should make more money.” In Boston, you really should read all these books. In Silicon Valley, “you should be more powerful.” When I visited Taipei, the information that came to mind was “you should rediscover your inner high school student.”
Glen Weyl and Audrey Tang giving speeches at a learning session in Taipei’s Nowhere bookstore, where I gave a talk on community notes four months ago.
In the past few years, when I visited Argentina multiple times, I was struck by the desire and willingness to build and apply the technology and ideas offered by Ethereum and the broader crypto world. If places like Silicon Valley are the front end, full of abstract thinking about a better future, then places like Argentina are the front lines, full of proactive motivation to address the challenges of today: hyperinflation and limited access to the global financial system in the case of Argentina. The adoption of cryptocurrencies there goes beyond the charts: I am recognized more frequently on the streets of Buenos Aires than in San Francisco. There are also many local builders with a surprising combination of pragmatism and idealism, dedicated to addressing people’s challenges, whether it’s cryptocurrency/fiat currency conversions or improving the state of Ethereum nodes in Latin America.
My friends and I paying with ETH at a café in Buenos Aires.
There are many other communities worth mentioning: the world-centric and highly international crypto community based in Dubai, the growing ZK community in East Asia and Southeast Asia, vibrant and pragmatic builders in Kenya, the public goods-oriented solar punk community in Colorado, and many more.
Finally, Zuzalu has created a very different and beautiful mobile sub-community in 2023, which is expected to thrive in the coming years. One important aspect of the Internet country movement that attracts me is that culture and communities are not only something to defend and protect, but also something that can be actively created and developed.
A person learns many lessons as they grow, and different people have different lessons. For me, some of them are:
Greed is not the only form of selfishness. Cowardice, laziness, resentment, and many other vices can cause a lot of harm. Additionally, greed itself can take many forms: greed for social status often proves as harmful as greed for money or power. As someone who grew up in gentle Canada, this was a major update for me: I felt I was taught to believe that greed for money and power was the root of most evil, and if I ensured that I wasn’t greedy for these things (e.g., by repeatedly advocating for reducing the ETH supply held by the top five “founders”), I was fulfilling my duty to be a good person. This is, of course, not true.
You’re allowed to have preferences without needing a complex scientific explanation for why your preferences are objectively and absolutely good. I tend to favor utilitarianism and find that it is often unfairly maligned and wrongly equated with heartlessness, but here, I think excessive utilitarian thinking can sometimes lead humans astray: the extent to which you can change your preferences is limited, so if you push too hard, you end up concocting reasons to explain why everything you like actually objectively serves universal human flourishing. This often leads to trying to convince others that these untimely arguments are correct, resulting in unnecessary conflict. A related lesson is that a person may not be right for you (in any situation: work, friendship, or otherwise) but is not a bad person in an absolute sense.
The importance of habits. I intentionally limit many of my personal daily goals. For example, I try to run 20 kilometers once a month and “do my best” the rest of the time. This is because the only effective habit is the one you actually maintain. If something is too difficult to sustain, you will give it up. As a digital nomad who frequently jumps continents and takes dozens of flights each year, any form of routine is challenging for me, and I have to deal with this reality. Although the gamification of Duolingo, pushing you to maintain a “streak” by doing something every day, has been useful for me, actually doing it is what works for me. Making positive decisions is difficult, so it’s best to make positive decisions that have the longest-lasting impact on your mind by reprogramming your mind to default to different patterns.
Every good thing in the social world—a community, an ideology, a “scene,” a nation, or even a very small company, a family, or a relationship—is created by people. Even in the few cases where you can write a reasonable story about how it existed since the dawn of human civilization and the Eighteenth Tribe, at some point someone had to actually write that story. These things are finite—both as things in themselves, as part of the world, and as things you experience, as a fusion of potential realities and your own conception and interpretation of them. As communities, places, scenes, companies, and families disappear, new communities must be created to replace them.
For me, 2023 was a year of watching many big and small things gradually disappear into the distant past. The world is changing rapidly, the framework I’ve used to try to understand the world is changing, and my role in shaping the world is also changing. There are deaths, a truly inevitable type of death that will continue to be with us even as the withering of human biological aging and death is removed from our civilization, but there are also births and rebirths. Staying active and doing what we can to create new things is the task for each of us.