Halving Belief

Crypto is back in the news because reasons. There are many of them, just like the vapid, preposition-less answer I just gave. This time around though there are now big men with lots of bluster and lots of funds and even more sunk costs issues. So here we are again, like it’s 2018.

Having been in and out of the blockchain/crypto/web3/whatever world for years and years, there is much that fascinates and that I support with this stuff. For instance the root initiative of decentralising our digital lives and giving people control over their own data which I fully back and I hope to work on for a living again if I can.

As a survivor of way too many faith-based ways of life, there is plenty that keeps me skeptical that I think need pointing out. I like crypto currencies a lot conceptually, but the problem is how they’ve gone beyond compelling and innovative ways to organise value. The issue is with belief. Sure the dollar, euro or pound are all at least partially based on belief. The US dollar is backed by a lot more. Granted a lot of this is this little Federal Reserve thing and also that US industrial and economic machine thing, as maybe at least partially the military. You hold a dollar, you hold a little bit of all that power. But crypto has gone a bit beyond that. The fact that a currency has a founding myth and a prophet is certifiably insane if you think about it. There are holidays. Much like a harvest festival, there is Halving every 4 years. This predicted and calculated event where the rewards for mining are halved. There are some weird Abrahamic sacrifice metaphors going on there for sure.

So all of this is in the news again that’s fine, because like the weather, we have to see what happens because there’s not much we can do about the huge forces swirling around outside of our windows. In a world careening more and more towards chaos and instability, we should think about the Genesis of this new money and why people started building an Ark to begin with.