Quantum, Crypto, and Collaboration

tl;dr: cryptoeconomic networks offers the opportunity to build cooperative systems that mimic nature and help us achieve our highest potential.

I’m feeling a bit optimistic, perhaps naively so, about the future of crypto this morning.

I mean, I’m normally generally bullish, so this may be know different but as I wrote last week, I’m concerned about the short-term push back given the increased focused on regulation stemming from the government’s mismanagement of the means of power, aka the US dollar.

However, today, because I just finished Carlo Rovelli’s book,?Helgoland, about the origins, implications, and potential meaning of the quantum mechanical revolution.

You don’t need to be an expert, or even understand the premise of quantum, to appreciate his conclusion.

“everything we have been able to accomplish over the centuries has been achieved in a network of exchanges, collaborating. This is why the politics of collaboration is so much more sensible and effective than the politics of competition.”

Ultimately, the crypto revolution is about much more than tech, it’s about creating a better foundation for an effective global collaboration where the “trust layer” is provably neutral. It’s like Switzerland w/o the people. The blockchain is the ultimate “honest broker.”

Rovelli writes that:

“Every time that something solid is put into doubt or dismantled, something else opens up and allows us to see further than we could before.”

and he’s talking about quantum physics compared to classical physics, but I’m extrapolating from there to think about economic systems.

What Satoshi did, through the Bitcoin?whitepaper, is put into doubt the very concept of fiat money by challenging how “value” is accounted for. In so doing, he allowed us to see further than we ever could before, opening up a world of smart contracts, DAOs, DeFi, NFTs, and millions of things still to come.

When all is said and done, what quantum shows us is that there is no “me” and “you,” there’s a “we.” Everything is interconnected. Everything is part of the One. Everything exists only in relation to everything else.

As Rovelli writes:

“The interconnectedness of things, the reflection of one in another, shines with a clear light that coldness of eighteenth-century mechanism could not capture.”

And the same could be said for 18th-century capitalism, that took the earth, natural resources, and even people as “objects” which could be used instead of a key element in a larger, interconnected universe.

What crypto seeks, I believe, and it’s far from perfect is an economic systems that immediately, by virtue of its design, recognizes how dependent and interconnected each of us is on the other.

You can’t have a decentralized network by yourself. You can’t provide security and scalability to the network by yourself. You HAVE to have others and the more “others” you have, the better off everyone is.

Your orientation shifts from “me” as consumer to “node” in a network, a community, who plays a vital role (whether big or small) in the health of the organism.

The same is true in quantum. If everything is interconnected, everything–people, trees, animals, rocks, dirt, air– it all matters.

Quantum and crypto are both avenues to raising our own levels of consciousness so we better appreciate how we contrbute-and how we benefit- from everyone else.

That awareness changes behavior and, hopefully, makes us all better off.