Sometimes people start out poor, and end up rich. Sometimes this is because they create real net value for the world, and sometimes this is because they gambled, where their wins came from others’ losses. But to the people involved, this difference may not be noticeable. What they see is how they started poor, then initiated many particular risky and effortful activities, had ups and downs which tempted them to quit, but had attitudes that made them persist, and then they finally succeeded.
You seem to be suggesting a kind of mimetic quality to crypto. What are the interesting projects which arise from this mimesis? Absent such specifics, it's unclear to me how realistic your argument is.
I think one way to prove the theory would be to go back and look at big (bubble-like?) speculations in the past, where prices of something skyrocketed, implying that at least some people made lots of money (if they got out early). Dutch Tulip, india companies, etc... then look thru the historic record of major innovations to see where their money came from. If Steve Von Dutchman made a ton of money on tulips and got out, then invested his money in, I don't know, a glassmaking business that made high quality lenses that Dr. Microscope used to discover bacteria or something.
I’m not sure why you would need to look at historical examples like tulips to prove or disprove this argument. Bitcoin has been around since 2008. That is more than enough time for the aforementioned crypto-rich to have funded the interesting projects to which Robin refers. So what are those projects? Absent specifics, this argument doesn’t amount to much of anything.
Sure, fair point - but I think crypto-rich people have done that! Look at the bios of people investing in VC-type startups, or just generally in other tech industries - a ton of them made lots of money in crypto. For every well-known "invested in successful tech thing in mid 2000s like Musk or Thiel, then plowed the money back into investing in other projects" there's also a bunch of "bitcoin millionaires" who sold at the peaks of 2017 or 2021 and then did the same.
There's also the timeframes: while yes, bitcoin has been around since 2008, for someone to have made the giga-quantities of "now I have crap tons of money to invest in wild business ideas" they would have only gotten those returns by 2017 or so, and so given normal windows for "I invest in a crazy idea, how long before the world recognizes it is great?" I am not *too* surprised to not yet see "Crazy Early Bitcoin Adopter Funds Cure for Cancer" headlines, but I think more muted forms of that headline are out there.
Also, I assume there is.... some euphemisms deployed with crypto. If you bought a lot of bitcoin in 2010 and sold in 2016 for a jillion bucks, your profits were unlikely to be taxed, and technically legally under subsequent investment rules, you would've owed a crap ton of capital gains taxes. If I then planned to put my name on prominent investments, I would suspect there is at least some suppression of "I totally earned all my millions investing in bitcoin in the early 2010s and therefore by definition did not pay taxes on that." I bet they just put "I made some good totally legal investments, and now I have money to spend on outlandish ventures."
This feels dramatically overoptimistic in its typecast of crypto investors, as some sort of inherently altruistic persona which I have a hard time subscribing to. I think it underestimates—potentially wildly—the percentage of these gamblers that were in it because they saw a chance at increasing their personal wealth, as many gamblers do, as oppose to those with "unique penetrating insights which let them see past the lies and conformity to bravely and in teams fight to create and pursue longshot bets..."
Agreed. We don't see cases of wealthy crypto folks doing other value-creating things in the world. (I'm not aware of a single instance. At one time Sam Bankman-Fried may have qualified but at this point his net impact on society looks negative.) Successful crypto people turn all their energies to...making more money in crypto. It's tulips all the way down.
I think what's being said here isn't "crypto winners have unique penetrating insights", but "crypto winners tell themselves they have unique penetrating insights". And in order to maintain the self-image of someone who has unique penetrating insights, can see through all the lies and conformity and whatnot, they engage in longshot attempts to make big changes in the world.
My read is that Robin thinks those longshot gambles are good, with upsides if they pan out that will be great for many people, and downsides if they don't pan out (as they often will not, being longshots) that will mainly be to that one gambler. My analogy is that this is like how mutations are usually bad, but sometimes good, by chance, and so on a population level it's good to have variation even though the individuals who vary almost always suffer for it. He's not saying the crypto-mutants are wise and that is the source of their wealth, but that variation and attempts to make change are good on net, because the world is pretty suboptimal - and people who got rich by luck and are now telling themselves a story about how it wasn't luck, can be change agents.
Where I live, there was a craze a few years ago around MLM essential oil schemes. A handful of folks became very wealthy, some broke even, and most lost money. The underlying product was described as a revolutionary cure for every ailment, but not actually used that much.
No one talks that much about essential oils these days. They've taken a boring place in most people's cabinets as modestly useful aromatherapy.
If there's a silver lining as you hope for cryptocurrency, I suspect it's as a similarly modest utility.
I think the interesting questions (at least, within the context of this post) is not "do essential oils work?" but rather, for the few people who did get wealthy, where did that profit/wealth get spent? If, on average, those winners spend it on just random consumption, then probably "investment speculation" isn't good for us. But if even one random person, perhaps even investing their (ill-gotten?) gains on some new idea that ends up resulting in some amazing new benefit for humanity, the general human species strategy of "speculate wildly on people with crazy new ideas" will persist. (Obviously we would prefer "speculate wildly on crazy new ideas that actually WORK" would be even better!)
"I suspect the historical record will show that past bursts of speculative fever tended to be followed by bursts of interesting projects funded by the speculation winners."
Yes, and paradoxically I feel like this is actually subconsciously (emergently? hive-mind-like?) what people are "trying" to accomplish. I feel like crypto is the most "pure" (in a neutral sense, not saying it's "good" - or "bad") form of aggregate investment speculation. For all the other features that may or may not exist, I feel like most coins rise in price purely based on "positive new tech feelings" and innate human novelty seeking. Some rise more than others, if they have perceived specific use-cases (real or not) but in aggregate they are essentially equivalent to buying shares in a "small cap start-up venture capitalist index fund with almost no filters."
So yeah there are scams, there are gains-recipients who blow it on heroin or fraud, there are "industry"-wide disasters, but the vital component of "why" people think that "crypto also uniquely satisfies a deep widespread desire to speculate and gamble" is because our brains are evolved to seek high reward, high-risk-for-the-individual strategies, (because evolution does not care if 99 monkeys die, if 1 monkey discovers something a thousand times better) and we've successfully internalized (as a species) that "wild eyed crazy person pitching new idea" is actually how those strategies often manifest themselves, and that on net, that (SO FAR) results in benefits for humanity as a whole. While certainly allowing that there may be highly negative returns for most "investors" and even "for everyone" relatively frequently. But the general strategy is "resources from not-crazy-idea people --> crazy-idea-people --> therefore crazy people have resources to explore, mostly fail, but sometimes succeed at plans that end up being better for everyone, on net."
My use of the term "investment" applies to everything from crypto to stocks to colonialism, the East India Company, to Alexander's conquests, to founding the first cities, to humans leaving east Africa, to "hey monkeys, let's go see what's in the next valley over".
Interesting idea. I interpret what you're saying is that crypto speculation and gambling work by hijacking our rewards system, in much the way that pornography hijacks our rewards system. These things provide simulacra of useful activity, exploiting the separation between the indirect cues for fitness (which our evolved behavior attends to) and fitness itself. The opportunity cost of all this useless activity is disproportionately borne by those without the rationality or self-control to resist temptation.
1) that things like drugs and porn are hijacking a much lower complexity portion of our rewards system, in some cases directly chemically. I don't think we need a grand theory to explain them.
2) that I think some of those instances (investment speculation in particular) have net benefits to humanity as a whole, even if most participants in those instances are harmed, in the exact same way that 99% of mutations are bad, but evolutionarily the system of "let's have mutations!" is good, even if they kill 99 monkeys, if the 1% cause some very beneficial trait to be passed on to ten million monkey descendants. Obviously I don't think porn or drug addiction qualifies, mostly due to the extremely unlikelihood of the profits from the field leading to innovation.
3) at the high level, I don't think "those without the rationality or self-control to resist temptation" in the context of crypto/investment speculation is a helpful way to think about it, for two reasons: Investing by definition is self-control - you forgo buying heroin or doritos now for the not-100% chance of having more in the future. And because evolution is not going to select against that generalizable "lack of rationality or self-control" if even a tiny % of the time it results in some highly positive inheritable trait.
That may be more relevant for how Bitcoin managed to bootstrap* up from having zero to non-zero value. Traditional theories of money (like chartalism) value fail to explain that, but Bitcoin as a community drawing such types could potentially do so.
the bootstrap mechanism, essentially though, was that "shared contagious hallucination" quality? "I change my mind and decide that I will give you something you already value, in exchange for these excludable ones and zeros (or green scraps of paper), which forces you to act as if they have value. If we then subsequently communicate to lots of other people our shared willingness to do this, they will come to value it (more) as well."
edit: specifically wanted to say, that link was a great read, thanks for mentioning it!
Watching crypto history since $160, and realising how important this gambling is, I still figure out how to make from the blockchain technology itself and implement it in my vision and projects not making profit from price etc…
My basic view of crypto is that it is the most rigorous framework for property rights in the digital realm, and assuming that the world economy continues digitizing, it should be #uponly for crypto.
This is a good thing, since I agree with Hanson that the sorts of people who tend to become rich in crypto are much more visionary and "interesting" than their equivalents in the more "traditional" sectors of the economy.
Almost all crypto will eventually go to zero. Most crypto projects rely on Ponzi tokenomics and deliver zero real world value. Even well-intentioned projects in the Ethereum ecosystem (and its various step children), are plagued with insurmountable scaling issues because of a fundamental design bottleneck: relying on account-based or state-dependent architecture that freezes whenever placed under serious loads (CryptoKitties crashing ETH, numerous Solana shutdowns, etc.). There is only one architecture able to scale in parallel: the cash-based or UTXO architecture invented by Satoshi. Most are also unaware that the original Bitcoin protocol also includes a Turing-complete smart contract programming script, and any ETH based Solidity smart contract can be easily recompiled to run on the original Bitcoin protocol (not BTC, which is a corrupted hard-fork). Satoshi’s genius is not fully understood or appreciated: his Bitcoin protocol uniquely tags and time-stamps data so that it can be owned and transferred without copying, fundamentally monetizing data for the first time. Prediction: this technology will disrupt the financial industry, destroy the advertising model of Big Tech, and will likely be integrated into the internet itself at the TCP/IP level.
As a self interested degenerate crypto gambler let me make this point in defense of crypto's utility:
It enables freedom of transacting value, and it's easy to under-appreciate it living in a mostly free country. As a recent example: crypto became the default way for people to get money out of russia, when they were fleeing after the war started.
It's not a "story" about the world. It is worlding, they are worlding. The way one might make a cocoon out of shiny excreta.
It's not art. It's not religion. It's not marketing. Sure, they all use stories and documentation, but it's worlding. We live it as much as we embody it, it's where our identities live, in the extended phenotype, in the metaverse of mythology, cryptic or not.
When you talk about people who get rich through crypto, I assume you're talking about the retail traders who buy low and sell high – not the people like SBF who start exchanges, do ICOs, and the like. Nobody in the latter group goes on to "pursue ambitious interesting projects to change the world". They stay in crypto.
My sense is that the retail investors themselves are pretty unsophisticated as a group. They are overwhelmingly young single men with relatively little investing knowledge, aiming to get rich quick. With no underlying value to the thing they're betting on, they tend to believe a set of narratives (diamond hands/hodl/to the moon) for why they'll get rich. There's a parallel to heavy slot machine players, who believe in such things as lucky machines and hot streaks (or to lotto players with their "lucky numbers").
I'm a bit skeptical that the winners here go on to "pursue ambitious interesting projects to change the world". I think it's more likely they buy Ferraris. But I could be wrong.
I'm not sure I can agree with that, especially the first part about the founders in crypto not pursuing ambitious interesting projects to change the world, but rather staying in crypto.
Some examples:
- Balaji Srinivasan popularised the concept of network states (many of the early "citizens" in Prospera ZEDE are crypto builders or at least would describe themselves as crypto-adjacent)
- Vitalik is currently working on Zuzalu, his own variation of a network state; he also funded longevity non-profits in the past
- Brian Armstrong founded NewLimit with the goal of extending human healthspan
- Of the 800 or so accounts I follow on Twitter, which consist almost exclusively of crypto developers and founders, 142 follow Robin Hanson
I could go on here about many more less well-known people, some of whom I know personally, who are doing extremely cool and potentially world-changing work. Be it around longevity, new governance models, public goods funding, sybil resistance/privacy preserving mechanisms to verify that you are a human being, and much more.
Viewing someone or something becoming extremely wealthy through speculation as a solution to a broken world seems strange to me. Obviously everyone has their own ideas about what is broken in the first place. What are we trying to fix exactly? What can we all agree on?
I think that is a brilliant idea, I tried managing my stock portfolio by myself and I lost 37% of my savings in a very short period. That prompted me to hire a financial advisor. Since then I have made up to $680K in returns.
There's a possibility for 100-200x APY with the current trending support, by implementing high passive algorithm to Take profits and Stop lost indicators, despite the market condition. You can connect with George gammon for guidance on;
You seem to be suggesting a kind of mimetic quality to crypto. What are the interesting projects which arise from this mimesis? Absent such specifics, it's unclear to me how realistic your argument is.
I think one way to prove the theory would be to go back and look at big (bubble-like?) speculations in the past, where prices of something skyrocketed, implying that at least some people made lots of money (if they got out early). Dutch Tulip, india companies, etc... then look thru the historic record of major innovations to see where their money came from. If Steve Von Dutchman made a ton of money on tulips and got out, then invested his money in, I don't know, a glassmaking business that made high quality lenses that Dr. Microscope used to discover bacteria or something.
I’m not sure why you would need to look at historical examples like tulips to prove or disprove this argument. Bitcoin has been around since 2008. That is more than enough time for the aforementioned crypto-rich to have funded the interesting projects to which Robin refers. So what are those projects? Absent specifics, this argument doesn’t amount to much of anything.
Sure, fair point - but I think crypto-rich people have done that! Look at the bios of people investing in VC-type startups, or just generally in other tech industries - a ton of them made lots of money in crypto. For every well-known "invested in successful tech thing in mid 2000s like Musk or Thiel, then plowed the money back into investing in other projects" there's also a bunch of "bitcoin millionaires" who sold at the peaks of 2017 or 2021 and then did the same.
There's also the timeframes: while yes, bitcoin has been around since 2008, for someone to have made the giga-quantities of "now I have crap tons of money to invest in wild business ideas" they would have only gotten those returns by 2017 or so, and so given normal windows for "I invest in a crazy idea, how long before the world recognizes it is great?" I am not *too* surprised to not yet see "Crazy Early Bitcoin Adopter Funds Cure for Cancer" headlines, but I think more muted forms of that headline are out there.
Also, I assume there is.... some euphemisms deployed with crypto. If you bought a lot of bitcoin in 2010 and sold in 2016 for a jillion bucks, your profits were unlikely to be taxed, and technically legally under subsequent investment rules, you would've owed a crap ton of capital gains taxes. If I then planned to put my name on prominent investments, I would suspect there is at least some suppression of "I totally earned all my millions investing in bitcoin in the early 2010s and therefore by definition did not pay taxes on that." I bet they just put "I made some good totally legal investments, and now I have money to spend on outlandish ventures."
This feels dramatically overoptimistic in its typecast of crypto investors, as some sort of inherently altruistic persona which I have a hard time subscribing to. I think it underestimates—potentially wildly—the percentage of these gamblers that were in it because they saw a chance at increasing their personal wealth, as many gamblers do, as oppose to those with "unique penetrating insights which let them see past the lies and conformity to bravely and in teams fight to create and pursue longshot bets..."
Agreed. We don't see cases of wealthy crypto folks doing other value-creating things in the world. (I'm not aware of a single instance. At one time Sam Bankman-Fried may have qualified but at this point his net impact on society looks negative.) Successful crypto people turn all their energies to...making more money in crypto. It's tulips all the way down.
I think what's being said here isn't "crypto winners have unique penetrating insights", but "crypto winners tell themselves they have unique penetrating insights". And in order to maintain the self-image of someone who has unique penetrating insights, can see through all the lies and conformity and whatnot, they engage in longshot attempts to make big changes in the world.
My read is that Robin thinks those longshot gambles are good, with upsides if they pan out that will be great for many people, and downsides if they don't pan out (as they often will not, being longshots) that will mainly be to that one gambler. My analogy is that this is like how mutations are usually bad, but sometimes good, by chance, and so on a population level it's good to have variation even though the individuals who vary almost always suffer for it. He's not saying the crypto-mutants are wise and that is the source of their wealth, but that variation and attempts to make change are good on net, because the world is pretty suboptimal - and people who got rich by luck and are now telling themselves a story about how it wasn't luck, can be change agents.
Adam Smith would have read that opening sentence and gone ballistic that you didn't mention rent-seeking.
good that you point out that reality is also part of the world.
Where I live, there was a craze a few years ago around MLM essential oil schemes. A handful of folks became very wealthy, some broke even, and most lost money. The underlying product was described as a revolutionary cure for every ailment, but not actually used that much.
No one talks that much about essential oils these days. They've taken a boring place in most people's cabinets as modestly useful aromatherapy.
If there's a silver lining as you hope for cryptocurrency, I suspect it's as a similarly modest utility.
The story people tell themselves re why they won in that context doesn't push them as much to be in interesting new projects.
I think the interesting questions (at least, within the context of this post) is not "do essential oils work?" but rather, for the few people who did get wealthy, where did that profit/wealth get spent? If, on average, those winners spend it on just random consumption, then probably "investment speculation" isn't good for us. But if even one random person, perhaps even investing their (ill-gotten?) gains on some new idea that ends up resulting in some amazing new benefit for humanity, the general human species strategy of "speculate wildly on people with crazy new ideas" will persist. (Obviously we would prefer "speculate wildly on crazy new ideas that actually WORK" would be even better!)
"I suspect the historical record will show that past bursts of speculative fever tended to be followed by bursts of interesting projects funded by the speculation winners."
Yes, and paradoxically I feel like this is actually subconsciously (emergently? hive-mind-like?) what people are "trying" to accomplish. I feel like crypto is the most "pure" (in a neutral sense, not saying it's "good" - or "bad") form of aggregate investment speculation. For all the other features that may or may not exist, I feel like most coins rise in price purely based on "positive new tech feelings" and innate human novelty seeking. Some rise more than others, if they have perceived specific use-cases (real or not) but in aggregate they are essentially equivalent to buying shares in a "small cap start-up venture capitalist index fund with almost no filters."
So yeah there are scams, there are gains-recipients who blow it on heroin or fraud, there are "industry"-wide disasters, but the vital component of "why" people think that "crypto also uniquely satisfies a deep widespread desire to speculate and gamble" is because our brains are evolved to seek high reward, high-risk-for-the-individual strategies, (because evolution does not care if 99 monkeys die, if 1 monkey discovers something a thousand times better) and we've successfully internalized (as a species) that "wild eyed crazy person pitching new idea" is actually how those strategies often manifest themselves, and that on net, that (SO FAR) results in benefits for humanity as a whole. While certainly allowing that there may be highly negative returns for most "investors" and even "for everyone" relatively frequently. But the general strategy is "resources from not-crazy-idea people --> crazy-idea-people --> therefore crazy people have resources to explore, mostly fail, but sometimes succeed at plans that end up being better for everyone, on net."
My use of the term "investment" applies to everything from crypto to stocks to colonialism, the East India Company, to Alexander's conquests, to founding the first cities, to humans leaving east Africa, to "hey monkeys, let's go see what's in the next valley over".
Interesting idea. I interpret what you're saying is that crypto speculation and gambling work by hijacking our rewards system, in much the way that pornography hijacks our rewards system. These things provide simulacra of useful activity, exploiting the separation between the indirect cues for fitness (which our evolved behavior attends to) and fitness itself. The opportunity cost of all this useless activity is disproportionately borne by those without the rationality or self-control to resist temptation.
yes, with 3 exceptions:
1) that things like drugs and porn are hijacking a much lower complexity portion of our rewards system, in some cases directly chemically. I don't think we need a grand theory to explain them.
2) that I think some of those instances (investment speculation in particular) have net benefits to humanity as a whole, even if most participants in those instances are harmed, in the exact same way that 99% of mutations are bad, but evolutionarily the system of "let's have mutations!" is good, even if they kill 99 monkeys, if the 1% cause some very beneficial trait to be passed on to ten million monkey descendants. Obviously I don't think porn or drug addiction qualifies, mostly due to the extremely unlikelihood of the profits from the field leading to innovation.
3) at the high level, I don't think "those without the rationality or self-control to resist temptation" in the context of crypto/investment speculation is a helpful way to think about it, for two reasons: Investing by definition is self-control - you forgo buying heroin or doritos now for the not-100% chance of having more in the future. And because evolution is not going to select against that generalizable "lack of rationality or self-control" if even a tiny % of the time it results in some highly positive inheritable trait.
That may be more relevant for how Bitcoin managed to bootstrap* up from having zero to non-zero value. Traditional theories of money (like chartalism) value fail to explain that, but Bitcoin as a community drawing such types could potentially do so.
* https://jpkoning.blogspot.com/2017/11/the-bootstrapping-of-thorne-magic-money.html
The question of how this managed to avoid the fate of all the prior versions is a good one.
Gwern has written about what made bitcoin different from its predecessors:
https://gwern.net/bitcoin-is-worse-is-better
the bootstrap mechanism, essentially though, was that "shared contagious hallucination" quality? "I change my mind and decide that I will give you something you already value, in exchange for these excludable ones and zeros (or green scraps of paper), which forces you to act as if they have value. If we then subsequently communicate to lots of other people our shared willingness to do this, they will come to value it (more) as well."
edit: specifically wanted to say, that link was a great read, thanks for mentioning it!
Now that crypto is in peoples 401ks is going to get a bail out if it ever crashes.
Oh yes :)
Watching crypto history since $160, and realising how important this gambling is, I still figure out how to make from the blockchain technology itself and implement it in my vision and projects not making profit from price etc…
back link https://whyweshould.substack.com/p/worlding-example-crypto-fairy-tales
My basic view of crypto is that it is the most rigorous framework for property rights in the digital realm, and assuming that the world economy continues digitizing, it should be #uponly for crypto.
This is a good thing, since I agree with Hanson that the sorts of people who tend to become rich in crypto are much more visionary and "interesting" than their equivalents in the more "traditional" sectors of the economy.
Almost all crypto will eventually go to zero. Most crypto projects rely on Ponzi tokenomics and deliver zero real world value. Even well-intentioned projects in the Ethereum ecosystem (and its various step children), are plagued with insurmountable scaling issues because of a fundamental design bottleneck: relying on account-based or state-dependent architecture that freezes whenever placed under serious loads (CryptoKitties crashing ETH, numerous Solana shutdowns, etc.). There is only one architecture able to scale in parallel: the cash-based or UTXO architecture invented by Satoshi. Most are also unaware that the original Bitcoin protocol also includes a Turing-complete smart contract programming script, and any ETH based Solidity smart contract can be easily recompiled to run on the original Bitcoin protocol (not BTC, which is a corrupted hard-fork). Satoshi’s genius is not fully understood or appreciated: his Bitcoin protocol uniquely tags and time-stamps data so that it can be owned and transferred without copying, fundamentally monetizing data for the first time. Prediction: this technology will disrupt the financial industry, destroy the advertising model of Big Tech, and will likely be integrated into the internet itself at the TCP/IP level.
As a self interested degenerate crypto gambler let me make this point in defense of crypto's utility:
It enables freedom of transacting value, and it's easy to under-appreciate it living in a mostly free country. As a recent example: crypto became the default way for people to get money out of russia, when they were fleeing after the war started.
Crypto is an insurance against oppression
It's not a "story" about the world. It is worlding, they are worlding. The way one might make a cocoon out of shiny excreta.
It's not art. It's not religion. It's not marketing. Sure, they all use stories and documentation, but it's worlding. We live it as much as we embody it, it's where our identities live, in the extended phenotype, in the metaverse of mythology, cryptic or not.
https://whyweshould.substack.com/p/worlding-world-building-artingreligioningmarketi
When you talk about people who get rich through crypto, I assume you're talking about the retail traders who buy low and sell high – not the people like SBF who start exchanges, do ICOs, and the like. Nobody in the latter group goes on to "pursue ambitious interesting projects to change the world". They stay in crypto.
My sense is that the retail investors themselves are pretty unsophisticated as a group. They are overwhelmingly young single men with relatively little investing knowledge, aiming to get rich quick. With no underlying value to the thing they're betting on, they tend to believe a set of narratives (diamond hands/hodl/to the moon) for why they'll get rich. There's a parallel to heavy slot machine players, who believe in such things as lucky machines and hot streaks (or to lotto players with their "lucky numbers").
I'm a bit skeptical that the winners here go on to "pursue ambitious interesting projects to change the world". I think it's more likely they buy Ferraris. But I could be wrong.
I'm not sure I can agree with that, especially the first part about the founders in crypto not pursuing ambitious interesting projects to change the world, but rather staying in crypto.
Some examples:
- Balaji Srinivasan popularised the concept of network states (many of the early "citizens" in Prospera ZEDE are crypto builders or at least would describe themselves as crypto-adjacent)
- Vitalik is currently working on Zuzalu, his own variation of a network state; he also funded longevity non-profits in the past
- Brian Armstrong founded NewLimit with the goal of extending human healthspan
- Of the 800 or so accounts I follow on Twitter, which consist almost exclusively of crypto developers and founders, 142 follow Robin Hanson
I could go on here about many more less well-known people, some of whom I know personally, who are doing extremely cool and potentially world-changing work. Be it around longevity, new governance models, public goods funding, sybil resistance/privacy preserving mechanisms to verify that you are a human being, and much more.
Viewing someone or something becoming extremely wealthy through speculation as a solution to a broken world seems strange to me. Obviously everyone has their own ideas about what is broken in the first place. What are we trying to fix exactly? What can we all agree on?
I think that is a brilliant idea, I tried managing my stock portfolio by myself and I lost 37% of my savings in a very short period. That prompted me to hire a financial advisor. Since then I have made up to $680K in returns.
There's a possibility for 100-200x APY with the current trending support, by implementing high passive algorithm to Take profits and Stop lost indicators, despite the market condition. You can connect with George gammon for guidance on;
WhatsApp; +1 2243814509
Telegam; Georgegamon1