The other day I was thinking out loud about why we do what we do at Helius. For context, Helius is a developer platform that gives developers the tools they need to create things in crypto. The reasoning goes something like:
crypto is important → therefore we must make it easy to build crypto things.
Helius focuses on the latter part of this, but I’ve often wondered what new employees must think when they see this. Do they understand why crypto is important? Does anyone really? Everyone seems to have varying aims — making money, rebuilding finance, or just the intellectual comfort of building frontier tech.
The common answer to why crypto is important is that centralization is bad and that we don’t need people in the middle telling us what they think. The state should not control how I spend my money, Twitter should not control what I’m allowed to say, and the Canadian government should not be able to control what I’m allowed to read.
This sounds good at first, but it’s a bit silly. Centralization isn’t “bad”. It’s a network topology — that is, a way of arranging a network of things. The things could be money, tweets, or information itself. There are many cases where centralization is actually good (for example, ask your girlfriend where she would like to eat). There are also cases where it’s bad. Similarly, decentralization is not inherently good or bad. Again, it’s just a way of arranging the participants in a network.
Some things should be decentralized, and some things should be centralized. Ok, so why is crypto important?
Get ready for this, it’s a big idea.
Crypto accelerates evolution.
No, I’m not referring to the evolution of living organisms via Darwin — I’m referring to the evolution of human ideas.
How? Let me paint a quick picture.
In the natural world, you have these things called genes and these genes are carried via living organisms like cats. The living organisms are in a constant battle against i) their environment (weather, terrain, natural disasters) and ii) their peers (lion vs. deer). You play this out over a long time frame and the best adapted living organisms (and their genes) survive, reproduce, and evolve.
If you squint, you’ll see that this is actually a decentralized flow of information in the real world. There is no central party (even if you believe in God, I doubt you can deny how nature works after seeing it with your own eyes) saying “I will make this animal win over the other.” In fact, when humans started doing that, we ended up with endangered species and second-order effects that we don’t even understand.
If you squint just a little bit more, you might also notice that I’m kind of describing the high-level ideas behind capitalism vs. communism.
Communism says: “we know the way things must be, and we will plan centrally to make them happen.”
Capitalism says: “we don’t really know shit, but we do know that in a free market, the best ideas will rise to the top.”
I’m not interested in getting into politics here. All I care about are results, and so far, it’s clear that capitalism and free markets (America) have been a more successful experiment. They are also another example of my earlier point. Capitalism is a decentralized flow of information.
You see where I’m going with this right?
Crypto is not important because it decentralizes money, gold, or tweets. It’s important because it decentralizes the flow of information. And decentralizing the flow of information is a necessary condition for the most important kind of evolution: the evolution of ideas.
The idea is the most important building block of human civilization. It’s what separates us from all other living beings. Just as evolution in nature requires the decentralization of information flows, the evolution of ideas also deeply requires that there be no central arbiter of what is allowed and not allowed. If we can pull this off, we can accelerate human progress.
Thanks for reading!
(Note: I have not proofread this even once. Sorry in advance.)
(Addendum: I realized after I wrote this that Packy McCormick also wrote a tangentially related post about how crypto’s endgame is to supercharge capitalism. You can read that here.)
Great post. Saifedean Ammous goes into a nice overview of open market advantages in his book "Principles of Economics"
Great article.