As I look around the rest of the crypto universe, I see tons of people who seem to be giving up on the space altogether, or feeling totally lost as a result of the market turmoil...

I believe this is because crypto has forgotten it's true purpose and the cypherpunk values that birthed this industry in the first place.

When I discovered Bitcoin, I became obsessed because it was the first time in my life that I believed a technology could change civilization as we knew it. I know some of you are thinking there have been plenty of technologies that have changed civilization: the internet, the printing press, electricity, to name a few.

But whereas those technologies may have improved our standard of living, I believe electronic cash has the potential to fundamentally change the way we govern and organize as a society in a way that those other technologies did not.

One thing that baffles me about crypto is how far the wider community has strayed from the original mission. So few people in the industry today seem to share the same goals and values that got me so excited in the first place. The goal of creating a new form of money enabling entirely new use cases, connects us in unprecedented ways, and empowers us to preserve our freedom rather than be forced to rely on financial systems under the complete control of politicians and bureaucrats.

But this can only be made possible through the creation of an electronic cash system that "allows payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution".

Yet instead of making that a reality, the crypto industry has gotten sidetracked by building trust based systems that merely recreate the legacy financial system we have today, or worse, reinforce its flaws under the guise of innovation.

I believe this is because most projects have either given up on the idea that blockchains can achieve mankind scale, or sacrificed the original mission to prioritize short-term profits.

But I continue to have faith in the vision that captured my imagination from day one. I believe in a future where people will have the freedom to transact no matter where they are, what they believe in, or who they want to transact with, by leveraging a decentralized peer-to-peer network that processes transactions instantly, cheaply, and reliably.

That is the future I believe in, and I hope to use this blog to help me articulate what that future might look like, and explore the steps we need to take to get there.

If you're someone who also believes in that vision—or wants to rediscover it—this blog is for you.

Crypto's Purpose