Author: Matti
Original title: The Optimistic Crypto Pitch
Compiled by: BitpushNews Yanan
Cryptocurrency has been viewed in many different ways: as a luxury for nerds, as a symbol of monetary anarchism, as the product of paranoia, and as a variety of other labels. Today’s crypto industry has long since surpassed the original libertarian dream of Satoshi Nakamoto and a handful of cypherpunk computer scientists. Cryptocurrency has passed its early days and its ideology has become increasingly diverse.
As it happens, our biggest enemies are not the dissenting “coinless” people, but those who dare to challenge our “holdings.” Bitcoin supporters hate Ethereum supporters, and Ethereum fans don’t like Solana followers. I’m not exaggerating when I say this, because it’s often the intolerant minority who shout the loudest. And the obvious conflict is not the discord between crypto believers and opponents, but the fight between different cryptocurrencies.
Talk of conflict may not sound optimistic, but it reveals how this subculture replicates religious conflicts of the past (and present). If cryptocurrency is a religion, it is a religion with a core belief in monetary, financial, and commercial revolutions. In this religion, gods are replaceable, narratives are flexible, and financial expectations are expandable. Crypto believers replace the traditional "we trust in God" with "we trust in the currency we hold."
Optimism
The optimism I am talking about is that individuals deeply recognize their own potential to change the world, embrace this ability, and draw motivation from their inherent wildness and primitive power.
Optimists are keen to try new things and are brave enough to take risks and challenges. They love freedom and despise tyranny. However, when optimists despise something, they will also personally participate in the opposition. They choose to stand up because they know that "when people can hate without risk, their ignorance is easy to incite and their motivation will naturally arise."
Optimists do not have the urge to "take power". They know that they will make mistakes from time to time, but even so, they will continue to work hard. They seize opportunities to explore, create, and rebuild a world that conforms to their ideals. Optimists understand that the ever-expanding knowledge is the string of life, which can enable future generations to play the music of life in breaking the old and establishing the new.
Optimists know that resources are not constraints, but fertile ground for opportunities. They firmly believe that ideas can inject vitality into resources and transform the surrounding environment into energy to help them move forward. For optimists, change is an indispensable driving force and the only way to progress.
So, what is the connection between this optimism and crypto speculation? Tracing back to its roots, we find that the deep optimism of cryptocurrency originates from a vision that a world where the government does not interfere in monetary affairs and allows it to develop freely will be a better world. It is this belief that inspired the birth and development of cryptocurrency.
It's not that governments are inherently evil, it's that they are prone to corruption. It's not human nature, it's that institutions that stay in power for a long time are subject to competition for power. Over time, they become inward-looking and start to serve only their own interests. Why is this? Because over time, these institutions tend to become dogmatic, rigid, and out of touch with the world, causing them to lose relevance and importance to the people. However, these institutions often refuse to die, and instead try to maintain their existence and relevance through various means. In this case, the world starts to serve them, and they no longer truly serve the world. In order to maintain their own survival, these institutions may abuse their power, even at the expense of the interests of the communities they govern.
The original idea of cryptocurrency, represented by Bitcoin, was to weaken power—not by the brute force of monopolies, but by immutable code in the cloud. It may have sounded like a foolish dream, but it was a huge success. Today, this optimistic experiment is worth trillions of dollars, and Bitcoin represents far more than its original scope.
Cryptocurrency
The cryptocurrency market is extremely volatile, and the higher the gains, the more severe the declines. Financial markets also follow some natural laws, and so does human mental state, with ups and downs. The cryptocurrency market never stops, there is always something new happening.
Scammers and critics alike are divided over whether memecoins are good or bad. Some have even succumbed to price action and lost their perspective. They have no idea whether the coins that venture capital firms have invested in and put on the market at crazy valuations will eventually soar or fizzle out.
Investors are like travelers chasing trends, jumping from one narrative to another, investing in projects that are often doomed to fail, never come to fruition, or no one cares even if they succeed. In the end, most projects will return to zero - damn zero! However, this may not be a bad thing.
The medium is the message. Memecoin and cryptocurrency are both a type of medium. Human behavior is only manifested in new ways under the impetus of new technologies. Zeroing out is just part of the game.
It doesn’t matter if it goes back to zero, because cryptocurrency is still the most promising technological movement in the world. Every technological and cultural innovation is accompanied by exploitation, which is a manifestation of its revolutionary nature. This innovation will cause information asymmetry, and people tend to quickly (and incorrectly) use this asymmetry to their own benefit.
But at the end of the day, in the crypto space, people are doing it themselves, trying to solve governance problems (however poorly), trying to build a new internet, trusted neutral payment channels, new physical infrastructure for all sorts of new and exciting use cases, funding research that would be hard to get funded elsewhere, cramming culture into monetary form, amassing generational wealth before a product has more than 1,000 users, building casinos as alternatives to traditional financial products, trying to build new cities and push the limits of life. Perhaps most of these attempts will fail or go astray, but that’s the great spirit of crypto.
The world of cryptocurrency is like a combination of the Wild West and Las Vegas. It’s a place where you can get rich overnight, but you’re more likely to get scammed out of your entire fortune by criminals. It’s a place where dreams can come true, land is up for grabs, and wealth is available for gambling.
Pessimists and Optimists
For many years, I have remembered Peter Thiel’s simplified 2×2 framework for optimism and pessimism. He cleverly illustrates this idea with the metaphor that “when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” Peter Thiel further distinguishes between certain and uncertain forms of pessimism and optimism.
“If you see the future as something certain, then it makes sense to try to understand it and shape it,” he wrote. “If, on the other hand, you see the future as something random and uncertain, you may give up trying to control it.”
The ambiguous pessimist "simply reacts to events as they happen, hoping that they won't get any worse. They cannot predict whether the inevitable decline will come suddenly or slowly, catastrophically or gradually. All they can do is wait for it to happen."
Explicit pessimists are "obsessed with imagining all the ways things could go wrong. They believe the future is predictable, and since it's bleak, they must prepare for it."
The ambiguous optimist envisions a better future, but they don’t know how to get there. Finally, the definite optimist not only sees a better future, but also makes plans and works to make it happen. This is the simplified version I developed for the dominant narrative on Twitter:
I see the relationship between politics and technology as a vertical divide between “clear” and “unclear.” That’s because politics is not about wealth creation, but governance and distribution. Even at its best, politics is just an enabler of technology and entrepreneurship. However, by its very nature, politics does not create the future. Technology does. It is the foundation of society and the network that facilitates the exchange of information between humans.
The horizontal dividing line is between the role of the individual and the role of the collective. Optimists emphasize the individual as the basis for change. They prefer to achieve bottom-up change and steady development through decentralization. On the contrary, pessimists believe that the world is fragile. They place their hopes on top-down control and believe that only those in power can solve problems and prevent further deterioration.
Let’s start with the explicit pessimistic narrative about AI. It’s “explicit” because it’s built on a specific technological paradigm. Why is it pessimistic? Because the core idea of this narrative is that machines are greater than humans themselves. It’s actually a new interpretation of God, which is embodied through chatbots talking to mortals. In this narrative, centralized algorithms dominate everything, and we are completely at the mercy of this technology.
Our fate is either to be destroyed by this advanced creature, or to study how to reach a consensus with AI on values. The AI here is more like "Abraham's interpretation" rather than pure artificial intelligence. Humans have become passive subjects, powerless and unable to stop it. They can only surrender and pray that they will not be destroyed by this surging force.
Another kind of pessimism, the ambiguous pessimism, sees itself as the sober one. They believe that all innovation has come to an end, and all we can do now is redistribute. The core of this view is power. They advocate using the lever effect of power to redistribute power from the powerful to the powerless. They believe that there is no other way, capitalism has failed, and we can only choose to freeze human nature, govern society with the cold hand of bureaucracy, and force ourselves to endure various inconveniences, such as the trouble caused by using paper straws.
Humans are the culprits, and nature is the victim. The poor are also victims. And the winners are the perpetrators. The only way to change this situation seems to be to make everyone suffer equally. But what's the point? The pursuit of superficial diversity and ideological uniformity is futile, and the rules made by vague pessimists do not apply to themselves because they claim to be the savior who can save us. The world is already in ruins, and we should no longer waste our energy on the pursuit of so-called progress, because in this twisted logic, the only "progress" is to achieve painful equality.
And those vague optimists are back to their old tricks, saying, "Hey, this isn't how things are solved. We should start over and solve the problem." But the question is, how? Going backwards is obviously not the answer, and the road ahead is full of unknowns. Embrace nationalism? Yes, it can enhance cultural cohesion, but once patriotism is over-inflated, it can turn into a destructive machine.
Undefined optimism rejects globalist uniformity and meaningless over-bureaucracy, but is confused by the shifting realities of new technologies. They feel threatened and tend to become closed-minded. They don't know how to embrace technology, especially when it is fundamental to how society works.
Banning social media? That’s like banning printing. The tide of reform is already flowing, and stifling reform is counterproductive. So how can we take the initiative and work hard to realize the specific version of the future world in our minds?
Unequivocal Crypto Optimism
After spending some time in cryptocurrencies, you realize that this space is a mess, an absolute mess. Yet this messy, noisy, and often misguided technological revolution is the product of a deep desire to gain control over our own affairs.
The first to be affected is the financial sector, because markets are the core mechanism for allocating resources. If we can change its structure, we can direct value to areas where the old vested interests dare not tread - they are satisfied with the status quo. But cryptocurrency is different. It wants change, and it is not just protesting. It is actively building and taking risks. Its goal is not to occupy Wall Street, but to liberate it.
Cryptocurrency is the embodiment of solarpunk, representing financial freedom, decentralized cities, and the spirit of funding scientific experiments. It is like a naughty child who doesn't listen. It looks innocent on the surface, but in fact, this decentralized, trusted, neutral currency without corruption and political bias is leading a substantial technological revolution. It allows funds to flow freely, ignoring those alarmist political speeches. Is it the tyranny of KYC (know your customer) and anti-money laundering policies that makes the world safer, or is it the other way around?
Cryptocurrency has created a whole new asset class that makes wealth mobile. Faced with high housing prices, many people are deterred, and cryptocurrencies have opened up a new path to bypass the bureaucratic mechanisms that prevent young people from owning wealth and getting ahead in life. It rejects the idea of "having nothing but being happy" and aspires to have everything, even if the process is painful. But the important thing is that this pain is borne on one's own will.
Sure, we’ve launched seemingly worthless NFTs, marketed overvalued tokens to clueless retail investors, and we’ve talked about it like it could save our lives. We’ve also funded some completely useless projects. But at the end of the day, that’s the nature of revolution. There’s no guarantee that it will be a good revolution.
We created the digital world, set new rules, and opened new games. The world is not perfect, but we are on a mission to embrace the individual and find novel financial and commercial means. These attempts may seem eccentric, but we have a clear vision to understand the nature of money as a force for change.
We move forward slowly but surely, with success at every step. Bitcoin, Ethereum, ICOs, Uniswap, Solana… What’s next? Bio.xyz? HairDAO? Most projects will fail at the forefront of exploration, and only a few will survive and have a profound impact on the world. We are accepting this asymmetry of outcomes and moving forward courageously.
Indeed, cryptocurrency is the real frontier. In this world, you don’t need a bunch of certificates to prove your worth, just a few lines of code are enough to make you famous. Bad ideas may be sent to the moon (and then never be heard of again), but good ideas have the same chance to stand out. We need more innovative ideas like this.
So if you haven't yet gotten into crypto, why not join the clowns, scammers, and pilgrims who have the opportunity to make a fortune, or lose a fortune. We invest in ventures that seem tragic and painful, but are full of potential.
We always need new people to help us get through this together. We can't rely on God to help us move forward because we are a group of determined, vague optimists. We need new ideas and bold execution to maintain the most clear, optimistic movement on the planet.
It’s not the old vested interests that are buying Bitcoin and Ethereum ETFs. What we need are ordinary people who dare to explore the frontiers, find inspiration, overcome all difficulties, and move forward courageously - it is this spirit that drives cryptocurrency forward.
