The days of irrational media-hyped bubble-mania are long gone it seems, as one strolls down the crypto-utopian boulevard. It is not surprising to see the many enthusiastic millennials of yonder, now soberly settling in the rash decisions of the past and rationalizing them as an immature phase, moving on to the next tech phenomenon that promises some disruptive future. Or in some cases, give in to the cynicism and apathy of the conservative financial thought leaders and get in line to buy the much overvalued stocks in the S&P 500 in hope that they will go up forever, blindly following the forecast of most of the financial media today.

But there’s a strange development going on in the underbelly of cryptography zealots and technologists that escapes the eye of the outside observer. It is the complete overhaul of the infrastructure, approach and belief system of the crypto-environment.

The underlying problem

As with any system humans have designed over the course of the last seven thousand years there are caveats to the fulfillment of the crypto paradigm. There are more than enough vulnerabilities in the system that could lead to infrastructural centralization, manipulation by state or corporate actors, regressive regulation and many more, but my focus is not on these issues. The real problem is a fairly complex one, and much more inherent to our behavioral habits.

And this problem has arrived with the dawn of the modern world. Some time in the twentieth century, we stopped heeding the advice of our forefathers and gave in to the wonders of modern society. This was a gradual process, and at the end of it faceless organizations of power had arisen, the new corporations of the world, nurtured with the power they robbed from the free individual. There is only one element to cause this disgraceful turn of events.

It is comfort.

Living a comfortable life for a few decades, (one could say a century) mostly for those fortunate enough to have been born in developed parts of the world, made societies acquire a derived trait of lethargic convenience.

It started with basic services that were needed for the advancement in living standards, but slowly the corporate motto became a gospel for making products convenient for the average consumer. Which really meant depriving them of their auto-determination, of the discernment to evaluate if giving in to the perks of consumer pampering would be detrimental to society as a whole at some point in the future.

Today most of the products we consume, tangible and intangible are fed to us unaware of their origins, components or contents. This is specially true in the software industry, where it is obscured in the form of proprietary source code, protected by supposed intellectual property rights, but in reality harbor the fascist surveillance complex that spies on everyone at all times. Open source became an alternative to this problem, but it is unlikely for an average individual to know how to read the source code of every application, operative system that he/she uses for everyday life.

Our political views and behaviors have also changed from a century or more ago. Leaving aside each region’s history, the peoples of the world now demand not to be left out by the corporate oligarchs running the show. And this premise is exactly what the new brand of political marketing is being engineered around.

The dilemma is always the same. People are afraid of confronting the ugly truths, so they prefer the easy way out, to complacently live in a world of lies.

And this is happening all over again in the crypto-sphere. The easy-money get-rich-quick schemes abounded at first. Now they have gone broke or exit-scammed most of their proponents out of their personal wealth. This has purged a lot of bad actors away from the system, but has also dealt a blow to the overall credibility of the technology and the market.

Change is inexorable

That present state of affairs will not remain as it is much longer. Corporate agents are learning how the technology works, how to adapt their gospel of complacency to the modern times ahead. Facebook was just the first example of a rash attempt at blending into what the zeitgeist is auguring.

The next attempts will not be this laughable.

The case for a global currency with total control over transactions and funds is a congressional hearing away. And this is what we as a community, and as free individuals must understand as the first of our problems. The only way forward is gaining the momentum necessary to impulse the widespread adoption of this technology. The technical debates and dilemmas about each coin have to be postponed for the sake of the greater picture.

In a divided space we will fall prey to the corporations that want to take us over.

The second priority should be focusing on privacy, there are many projects and models of privacy that can be discussed but this is detrimental to the first task, there must be a consensus to generate a cross-platform development of privacy-enabling technology, regardless for which particular project.

The most decentralized models should be taken as examples to follow.

Then there is the educational angle. Most crypto communities have the default tools for communication, chat groups, reddit, github and others. Happily most requests for information go through one of these gateways, but there is something missing. The fact that this is a political movement can no longer be ignored. It was a political statement in its inception, when Satoshi Nakamoto first released the whitepaper and started mining bitcoin’s first blocks, embedding the famous caption of the failing banks in the genesis block, as it is a political machine of consensus now. Many members of the community will not agree with this, and mostly discussion is never about the principles that got us here, and always about price speculation or useless tribalism.

As happens in many other communities, the political or ideological views of its members are very different, but the underlying set of rules by which we decide to transact with each other are sound. We must have the same consensus for principles such as personal freedom, freedom of speech, privacy, and equality.

There must be a more intertwined and decentralized organization that can take action in physical day to day life, should the need originate as an outcome of government action. We have already seen cases in which coins were tracked, traders were arrested or kidnapped, public figures in the space will likely be under surveillance and every piece of information around it will be monitored.

It cannot be stressed enough: underestimating the swiftness with which governments will begin to react when they understand the full scope of what this change means for them and their overlords at their corporate headquarters can result in your demise. Only because you have lived your whole life in a western developed so-called democracy does not mean you are safe. And even if that were the case, the majority of the world is still in grave danger. If you are free but surrounded by cages and the constant screaming of the oppressed, are you really free?

Identifying your role in the paradigm-shift

So what can we do to help? This is the first fundamental question every person yearning for change has to ask themselves.

The path to change is steep and full of dangers of the greatest magnitude. But it is the only path worth taking if we mean to be the agents of change. Put in a more explicit way, there are a few things that ordinary people can do to help:

1. Run your own node. It is really important to make the network as distributed as possible, and running your own node makes it more resilient to attacks and more decentralized.
2. Spend. Something that has not really been publicized enough. Cryptocurrencies were designed as electronic peer-to-peer cash, they’re meant to be used. As more users understand the underlying technology and implement it in their daily lives, adoption will grow exponentially, making the network effect possible.
3. Code. This is for a minority of skilled developers and coders that have the knowledge to contribute to the source code, but if you are committed enough to learn and dedicate your life to advancing your knowledge in this field, this would be the ultimate goal to achieve.
4. Mining. While mining bitcoin is not possible for the average individual, there are other options with decentralized models, commodity grade hardware for mining and protocol-layer enabled privacy such as monero(XMR).
5. Communication. It is one of the most downplayed aspects of cryptocurrencies but it is essential for their adoption. Financial illiteracy is widespread, this is the first obstacle to tackle.

To paraphrase JFK’s famous quote: To my fellow crypto enthusiast:Ask not what crypto can do for you, ask what you can do for crypto. And to my fellow citizen of the world: Ask not what bitcoin will do for you, but what together we can do for the freedom of humanity.