Adolescent Fantasies of a Crypto-Powered Stateless Future Abound

This blog post by Alex (al3x) Payne, early Twitter employee and former CTO of Simple, made me want to do a little fist-pump when I read it before bed last night:

Working in technology has an element of pioneering, and with new frontiers come those who would prefer to leave civilization behind. But in a time of growing inequality, we need technology that preserves and renews the civilization we already have. The first step in this direction is for technologists to engage with the experiences and struggles of those outside their industry and community. There’s a big, wide, increasingly poor world out there, and it doesn’t need 99% of what Silicon Valley is selling.

I’ve enjoyed the thought experiment of Bitcoin as much as the next nerd, but it’s time to dispense with the opportunism and adolescent fantasies of a crypto-powered stateless future and return to the work of building technology and social services that meaningfully and accountably improve our collective quality of life.

See, the big-deal venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz just invested $25M into a Bitcoin service called Coin Base, thereby legitimizing it, or at least implicitly legitimizing its potential profitability. Chris Dixon, who now works as an investor at Andreessen, announced the investment on his blog, claiming that, contrary to how Bitcoin is portrayed in the press, to ‘technologists’ in Silicon Valley, Bitcoin is viewed as a “profound technological breakthrough.”

Meanwhile: Bitcoin is tanking because China was basically like, “Um no.”

Photo: btckeychain

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