Crypto Is About Social Coordination
This is what crypto means to me, not 'money' or 'freedom'.
Crypto's core feature is social coordination, not 'freedom'
Financial sovereignty (freedom) is a byproduct of this coordination, not the other way around. I enjoyed much of the Permissionless keynote, where crypto was equated to freedom. But, I was taken aback by that flavor of anarchy. For this reason, parts of the Permissionless keynote by Vorhees felt misguided, and my take here is a response to it.
Crypto is a substrate for rapid iteration over coordination systems such as finance/economics, voting, resource allocation (eg taxes), conflict resolution... The sandbox that is crypto is enabling a renaissance of governance, allowing people to test new systems at scale, such as Harberger tax and quadratic voting, that have been otherwise confined to theory/academia for decades.
There's so much libertarian maximalism in this space, which is in opposition to the core property: social coordination. Libertarian maximalism equates to zero coordination/ chaos. Yes yes the opposite of libertarianism is tyranny and we don't want that either, but crypto is a substrate for accelerating our understanding of various coordination systems, not one single coordination system to adhere to.
I embrace and love many libertarian movements in the crypto space, but as with nearly all other things: maximalism bad.
For more on social coordination, I encourage you to read Meditations on Moloch: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
These thoughts were first shared on Twitter: