We are all early adopters. Which coins we buy matters. Vitalik said it best.

Many of you have read the TIME interview with Vitalik, speaking eloquently about an identity crisis in crypto that has grown over the past few years. What is crypto even about any more? A lot of very talented developers are asking "how" questions. Like "how can we solve the trilemma?" or "how can we get more transactions per second?" or "how can we make the best L2?". Those are all important questions. But Vitalik is one of the few visionaries who asks "why?". Without a vision, you can ask "how?" all you want but won't be able to pick the correct answer. We must consider that we all are still early adopters: what we invest in actually matters, it might actually change the trajectory of the future. Most people still do not hold or interact with crypto.

As an example, I often here Monero fans talk about how Monero is everything Bitcoin claims to be. They say it brings privacy and autonomy like Bitcoin, it brings decentralization like Bitcoin claims to (through ASIC-resistant mining), and that it better fits the ethos behind Bitcoin. And it's hard to ignore those points, they have some validity, only a true die-hard "maxi" would say they are irrelevant. I say this as somebody who holds both, making room for nuance is important. Yet we have so much tribal infighting and gains-chasing that we fail to see, focus, and collaborate on all the real, tangible good that crypto and web3 could bring to the world. There are many, many coins which are awesome and bring unique things to the table, but simply don't get the coverage because they lack the hype or the VC backing or the promise of quick short-term gains.

As another example, there are some remarkable things happening in DeSci. There are blockchains which will revolutionize the way that scientific research is funded, published, shared, and capitalized on, to "decentralize" the production of science much in the same way that open source did to software development, to produce a patent-free warchest of drugs and treatments for humanity. This literally is already happening, a few months back a volunteer computing project Folding@home discovered and published new patent-free antiviral for covid which it set to enter human trials in a year. Many of you are familiar with Banano which incentivizes participation in folding@home and is in fact the top team there. Yet the DeSci topic rarely makes the front page here even though there's a half-dozen coins in it, some of which like Gridcoin have been around since 2013, long before 90% of the coins mentioned on the front page. Or the coin backed by Brian Armstrong (CEO of Coinbase) called Research Coin which is used to incentivize participation in an online science journal of sorts called ResearchHub.

And none of this even touches on the ways that blockchain technology is going to be used to change the way that democracies and governments function. Liquid voting, participatory budgeting, transparent legislative processes, oh my! I am excited about crypto for the same reasons I always have been: because it is a technology that can fundamentally change the world for the better, and I am proud to be here as an early adopter with all of you. But as Vitalik and Edward Snowden point out, blockchain technology also contains the mechanisms for turnkey totalitarianism. If we always chase gains as our "why", that is likely where we will end up.

So I guess I am just encouraging you to ask yourself why crypto is exciting, because I think for a lot of you it is more than the "how" and more than the candle charts. What we invest in now will determine the future, so it's an important question to ask. We can chase gains, of course, but let's also encourage each other to ask questions, learn from each other, and ask why. Many of us are new here, let's be good to each other :)