Cryptocurrency as religion

When I was travelling through Vietnam, spending the massive gains I made from the 2018 bullrun and seeing the world that due to my financial status I had only been able to explore via the internet; I met an englishman who was also travelling.

He was about 6'5 and had the muscular definition of a lino floor. We found ourselves in a buddhist mega temple that could feasibly allow for a few thousand or worshipers - although it was empty that day and if you ever go to a buddhist temple for lunch, they feed you strange vegetarian foods for free.

While there we got talking about crypto currency as he knew that was how I was funding this wayward adventure, and I explained it by saying "crypto is as close to religion and god as I have ever felt"

Im not sure he understood my meaning but it is something that I have thought about for a while and I would like to express this concept via whimsicle prose and shed light on an aspect of this space that many seem to get caught up in. It is part of what /cc calls 'tribalism' but to me it seems far closer to the way religious sects operate.

Each religion proclaims to hold a truth that you don't know, and can only come to know through study and worship of their sacred texts. That truth can vary but overall they focus on two core ideas, namely 'where did we come from' and 'where do we go (when we die)'. The mechanics of how you get there and who is allowed to go vary to the point of war. They weave great stories about heaven and how you can have everything you want, every desire is filled and you want for nothing in Heaven. Do you want a writhing pile of virgins? do you want to sit on the milkshake cloud? do you want to be reunited with all your loved ones and live in peace for eternity?

In Crypto, most of us here are fairly well educated people from areas of the world where religion is dying. We often don't think about an afterlife as having any real value, at least not enough to lead a life of piety and grace to increase our changes of being selected to stand atop Mount Olympus with the gods.

Instead we seek to reach the promises of heaven - having anything we want, a life of luxury and peace - through the accumulation money now. because right now is a guarantee, while heaven isn't.

Each of these projects are subtly pushing an underlying message that 'if you just believe in this project (and give us all your money) then we will deliver unto you untold riches and a lifestyle that few have come to know in history. Crypto for the poor and non-religious is essentially a promise of economic heaven. However if someoneone doesnt believe in your project, and follows another - then they are apart of a cult. Anyone who owns solana is fundamentally a moron. anyone who follows Cardano are in a cult. Anyone who plays with ETH defi are degenerate gamblers, and we become separated just like muslims, catholics, and jews.

When I say that 'crypto is as close as I have come to religion' I mean the necessity that faith plays in the investing cycle. Bitcoin was 60+ thousand dollars and dropped to 13k only 18months later, and even if you don't hold bitcoin, your project has most likely suffered a similar fate. Yet we all still hold, we believe that this technology will save us from the capitalist Big Bad, "its just taking a little longer than expected"

That is the exact same mechanism that religion uses, feeds on and exploits for control of your mind. "yeah my dad died from cancer, but it was God's will."

"yeah Hitler murdered 6 million of us, but YHWH saved enough of us to begin again - just as he did in Egypt"

"yes Ethereum is slow and has unbelievable transaction costs, but ETH 2.0 should fix all this"

"Yes Cardano is hard to develop on with very little activity and low throughput, but Hydra should fix all this"

There is a concept in the world of buying tech such as phones and laptops - even games, that you should shop a product by how it behaves now, not how it might. If a phone manufacturer tried selling you an ePhone and said "yeah it is slow and expensive to use, we are working on that and will release a firmware update 5 years from now that will make almost no substantial impact to performance or cost" you would simply not buy that phone.

However in crypto that is basically standard operating procedure, which we all seem to throw stupid amounts of money at because we believe that the tech is the saviour to all our problems....built on the false assumption that money is the root cause of all our problems.

I personally managed to turn $8000 into $285,000 over 3 years, and was underwhelmed and perhaps depressed at just how little it changed my life. I was still the same person - I still had the same friends and went to the same pubs. I continued to drive the same car, because my 13 year old Chev did the job just fine, and it still does 3 years later. Because fundamentally I was the same person, and more importantly, my actual income had not changed.

300k is not enough to retire on. not enough to buy a house, not enough to do anything significant other than upgrade some of the things you own - which because I worked 40 hours a week, I could do anyway. You may think that $300k would change your life, but It only changes the number of options you have - it will not change who you are, or how you decide which options to pick.

So what is the point of this rant? To point out some real truths.

Blockchain mass adoption is still a long way off. i don't mean years, I mean decades. Invention of the internet was 1983. It took 11 years for us to get to Netscape Navigator. another 5 for a decent search engine and paypal, another 8 years for Youtube and cloud storage to begin in their infancy. This was with massive government support, and billions in public infrastructure- far less focus on regulation.

If blockchain halves that development time, we are still looking at another 10 years for a good quality blockchain based streaming service where you can own a movie as an NFT - or similar dreams people have.

It is important to not give up other ideas, career opportunities, retirement plans, hobbies, friends and personal development and replace them with religion or with devotion blockchain and refreshing CMC every 40 seconds of every day. because at the end of the day it is very easy to be both rich and sad.

-thank you for coming to my ted talk.