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Learning to Trust in Trustless Crypto

History is rife with cases where immeasurable time and effort was dedicated to a new technology that ultimately proved to be a flop.

Dirigible airships were once thought to be the future of air travel; Betamax, the future of home movies; Smell-O-Vision, the future of immersive entertainment; and Google Glass, the future of wearable computing.

In each case, smart, earnest and devoted people poured countless hours into developing a technology they truly believed in, only to be disappointed.

But has any emerging technology ever attracted anything like the developer hours that tens of thousands of true believers have devoted to cryptocurrency and not gone on to do great things?

This is an unfalsifiable claim (my favorite kind). But whenever I get out of my work-from-home bubble for an opportunity to listen to smart people talk about crypto in real life (as I did at both Princeton University’s DeCenter and the CT Crypto Forum last week), I always come away thinking that no matter what token prices happen to be doing (crashing, at the time), crypto is going to be fine. There are too many smart, dedicated people working on it for it not to be.

It’s admittedly not so easy to keep the faith — for all of the developer hours committed to the cause, it’s been fifteen full years since Satoshi released their white paper, and we still haven’t managed to realize crypto’s most basic use case (payments).

But irrespective of what we currently have to show for all those hours (memecoins, mostly), the sheer number of them may itself be a key indicator of future success.

Any endeavor able to both attract and retain this much talent must have something going for it beyond the prospect of building a bigger, better casino — if for no other reason than hardly anyone says that’s why they’re here. 

Even crypto people, too distrustful to take anyone at their word, don’t seem to appreciate this — probably because we all spend too much time on the sofa scrolling through X and not enough time out talking to people.

Crypto’s muppets

Listening to a crypto founder, developer or well-meaning investor discuss a new protocol is often a jarringly different experience from listening to the snarky consensus that inevitably forms on social media.

Crypto Twitter, so full of Statlers and Waldorfs, is always quick to ascribe the worst intentions to crypto’s builders. 

This is understandable, because the space has admittedly been full of rugs, scams and vaporware.

But it’s also full of hard-working, super smart mission-driven people.

For every ZKasino scam besmirching the industry’s image (with hitmen even?), there's a Blast or Ethena protocol that is equally maligned on social media but that, at the very least, is well-intentioned.

Even the crypto faithful seem jadedly distrustful of the well-intentioned ones. 

Consider the competing takes on the recently launched restaking protocol Karak, whose founders have been outed on X as “the same team that rugged risk harbor” and allegedly stealing $7 million of users’ funds.

The distrusting implication of those hot takes is that Karak’s founders started their previous project with the express intention of stealing from users, and that they must therefore have the same intention with every subsequent project, too.

The trusting take, however, is that the previous project didn’t work out for some unforeseen reason (just like the vast majority of newly formed businesses don’t work out). And that now, the founding team has learned what there was to learn and incorporated those learnings into a new, hopefully improved protocol (just like every once-failed entrepreneur is expected to do).

On a recent episode of the Bell Curve podcast, early-stage investors in the staking protocol explained that Karak’s founders moved on from their previous venture, Risk Harbor, when they realized that "collateral pools as risk models aren’t as strong as security models with restaking assets."

The distrusting take is arch and knee-jerk suspicious — the trusting take is thoughtful and probably correct.

Which do you think will get more traction in X-obsessed crypto? 

Sincerely contrarian

I am naturally contrarian and in most of life that can make me annoyingly suspicious of everything and gratingly ironic (thank you, long-suffering friends and family for sticking with me).

In crypto life, however, being contrarian more often means being sincere and therefore non-ironic.

This is itself ironic!

Bitcoin is perhaps most succinctly described as “money for enemies,” because its founding principle and core belief is trustlessness.

That formative wariness has attracted a certain type of skeptical, distrusting devotee that’s always on the lookout for enemies in disguise, wielding irony and conspiratorial takes in their defense (the Fed is stealing from you, stocks are memes, everything is a scam...).

But the reverse psychology of trustless crypto is that to be contrarian-ironic is to be trustingly sincere.

Terra Luna and Olympus DAO, for example, are so widely regarded as scams (even within crypto) that anyone making the counter-argument that those ill-fated protocols were mostly well-meaning and might have worked risks being ridiculed as childishly naive and gullible.

But I think they mostly meant well and I think they might have worked!

In hindsight, I’d argue that those two long-shot experiments were at least as plausible as flying people around in metal balloons filled with combustible hydrogen.

Given the results, it’s easy to mock that idea (note: smoking was allowed on the Hindenburg) and assume that their demise was inevitable. 

But the truth is that Zeppelins could well have worked because they were a much better idea than you probably think — so much so that they might even be poised for a comeback.

What dirigible airships have so far lacked, however, is legions of devoted developers willing to ignore all the Statlers and Waldorfs chirping from the balcony.

Crypto has tens of thousands of those and that may be all we need to know to stay sincerely optimistic.

― Byron Gilliam

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