I never thought I would understand what special words about money meant. My attitude toward money was always: If G-d wants me to have it, I will, otherwise it is what it is. In 2021 I got a phone call from a friend in LA who explained what an NFT was and asked if I wanted to make one. It was supposed to take a month but it took nine. I was added to Telegram groups with guys who had held bitcoin since 2011, comparing places to be cryogenically frozen when they die and requesting services like Uber but with more aggressive drivers, who would cut others off or drive in the breakdown lane to get them somewhere faster.
PVP means player vs. player – when you’re trading the crypto chart, you’re profiting against the losses of others. It’s a game where everyone walks into a room blindfolded and the person who leaves when the most people are still inside is the winner.
Although crypto is a much less ideologically unified space than art or literary worlds, there are some common threads that run through most actors. These are often simplified into labels like “tech libertarian,” which isn’t completely wrong, but I think the specifics are more interesting: Immutability – no government should be able to turn off your bank account. Self-custody – (similar to the above) the security of your funds is in your own hands. Transparency – every single event on a blockchain is recorded, publicly accessible, and available 24/7 to anyone in the world – with no barrier to viewing via a login etc. Permissionless systems – user activity is not subject to the approval of any human arbiter. All processes on chain are programmatically bound to pre-defined rules.
The more utopian actors in the space believe they can harness these technologies and the val- ues they imply to reshape life on earth beginning with social experiments like Próspera, a charter city (private, for-profit) in Honduras with crypto heavily woven into its fabric ...
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