It is important to periodically remind ourselves of this. I'm writing this in Aug 2024.

For many (may be even for most), crypto is a form of speculation and gambling over new asset types.

For the more puritanical types (or honest minority, in crypto language) , the ones who actually end up altering the world with a vision, it is about building distributed systems with the following properties, in descending order of importance:

1. Trust minimisation: Ability of the system to reduce dependence on individuals, groups , institutions, businesses , governments to perform its tasks and workflows. It also means the ability to create unstoppable systems with just honest minority operators.

2. Permission-less participation: There are three levels of participation:

  • Network-level: Ability of users to participate in core network tasks (such as consensus), have a say in decision making through governance and voting, ability to create and join communities, and participate in the evolution of the network.
  • Asset-level: Ability of users to create, own, protect and transact with assets with exclusive access controls.
  • Code-level: Ability of developers to permissionlessly compose with and build over existing code deployments to create exponentially powerful systems.

3. Censorship resistance: Censorship by political, social, economic and ideological actors, and other trusted third parties, can take the form of many threats including (but not restricted to):

  • Blocking access to assets and data of individual users or community
  • Stealing assets
  • Delaying user actions
  • Causing financial damage in user transactions
  • Moderating or removing user content
  • Manipulating code
  • Forcing user to reveal personally identifiable information to participate in network activities
  • Preventing a user from participation in network-level activities
  • Preventing developers from building over existing code deployment
  • Making it expensive for an average user to participate and transact

4. Verifiability: Users that do not participate in performance or governance of network activities, but wish to objectively (aka cryptographically) verify the operation of the distributed system, should be able to do so permissionlessly and in a cost-effective manner without reliance on trusted third parties.

5. Single point of failure : Crypto systems must be able to protect network state and code and recover from failures even under the technical failure or malicious actions of network operators. Also known as liveness.

6. Privacy: Privacy includes the right to exist and transact in the network without doxxing identity. Privacy also means the ability for users to control external visibility and access to user-owned or user-generated data.

There are numerous forces that either directly oppose or indirectly distract us from the creation of such systems.

Let's not lose sight of this mission.