i’ve been dealing with many doubts for the past couple of months. some of these doubts include the things that i want to work on, what my priorities are (and what they should be), the kind of people i want to surround myself with, and every other intricacy that the average person at some point asks themselves. as i started to dive deeper, i came to a realization that i love crypto. it’s a space full of people that are outcasts, filled with resilience, and to be honest weird (i'm included in this bucket).
the thing is though, weird people are the best people. for example, steve jobs was weird - the dude never showered (okay, maybe that’s a little too weird, but you get the point). despite that, he was a world-class entrepreneur. to be working in crypto you have to have that energy. you have to be extremely confident in both yourself and the industry. i’m sure everyone who has worked in crypto has had a moment where they are explaining something to a room full of people who have no idea what you are talking about. if i'm being honest though, i think over time people feel the energy that you have from these conversations. this energy also doesn’t create overnight, it accumulates over time.
crypto is a technology that isn’t meant for any particular country, its meant for the world. i currently live in san francisco, a place where people from around the world move to in hopes of their dreams succeeding. crypto eventually will make it so you don’t have to be in san francisco (or any major metropolitan city) to be able to accomplish your dreams. you will be able to lay out your thoughts, your accomplishments, your ambitions, put it all together and people will give you money to make things happen. on the flip side, i will have the ability to invest in companies right when they get made (i.e, i get an opportunity to 10x, 100x in a way that currently isn’t possible). similarly, the amount of open data that is available will allow for so many applications to be on top of it.
currently on farcaster (based on https://farcaster.network/), there are over 2 million casts. i’d imagine this number will grow over time. that is a lot of information that is public and available for anyone to use. as that number grows, so will the number of applications that can be built with that data.
thus far, software has been a net negative for the mental stability of the average person, but if people could build public goods with the expectation that they are rewarded through programs like optimism’s retropgf (https://community.optimism.io/docs/governance/retropgf-3/), there will be a massive influx of positive impacts that can come from it. for example - i could build an application around connecting like-minded individuals, and since i don’t care about profit, i could build it in a way that actually connects the right people (this logic could also be applied to other things like a dating app). When the incentive is 100% profit non stop, that’s when incentives start to become misaligned.
to put it simply, i’m excited for what’s to come. i’m excited for the ideas people will come up with, i’m excited for this technology to grow, and most of all i’m excited to meet others who are also here for the journey.