At what point do digital assets become money? In this article I dive into how crypto has grown a questionable reputation in the world, how we are conditioned by society on certain levels and gate-kept from critical knowledge and information, and how we can protect and empower underserved communities, bring them an advantage to leverage the playing field, and protect culture from erasure in the modern age?

Being a man isn’t having force and leading. Many people in the working class believe and think that raw strength dictates, controls, and leads to great solution. However, the biggest indicator to true leadership is knowledge, and most importantly... sensitivity.

This perspective challenges traditional notions of masculinity and leadership, which often prioritize force and authority over emotional intelligence and sensitivity. In reality, leadership rooted in sensitivity allows for deeper empathy, understanding, and connection with others. It’s not about domination or control but about guiding with compassion, listening, and responding thoughtfully.

From an early age as Americans, we are conditioned. To follow the sound of the bell in school, to dictate our direction, switch and change rooms, and to read the books and study the events that the states, school boards, and districts believe to be imperative for our development, or at the very least fill in the blanks for us as the future of an American society.

This reflection touches on how our American educational system shapes young minds in both positive and limiting ways. The school bell, the structure of classes, and the carefully selected curriculum are part of a larger system designed to control and guide behavior, almost like a training ground for future citizens.

From an early age, students are taught not only academic content but also societal norms—where to go, how to act, and who to listen to. These institutional methods serve to regulate large groups of children, keeping them safe while also providing a framework for education.

However, the system is not neutral. And because of red-lining and tax structure, the wealthier your area is, directly dictates the quality of information your child is able to access unless you wish to pay... at least until the internet was born.

The rise of the internet has disrupted this model by offering broader access to information, yet the divide persists, as digital literacy and access to technology still vary widely.

"Key Opinion Leaders" in crypto are mostly known as "influencers" because before crypto people followed popular accounts, some that made subliminal yaps about nothing, some that impersonated celebrities and made the same brainrot subliminal yaps about nothing.

This is because the beginning of an online free-for-all was led by Twitter's ability to get celebrities tweeting and posting small bits of content that people could directly follow for the first time. It was the place where you didn't use your full name and face, and it became the ecosystem for everything online, internet, and what has accelerated are features and outcomes that directly reflect our behavior as humans and how we used the tool.

George A. Akerlof, an American economist. Introduced the analogy of high-quality goods (plums) and low-quality goods (lemons) in his influential 1970 paper titled “The Market for Lemons: Quality Uncertainty and the Market Mechanism.”

When it comes to blockchain technology and crypto, KOLs and crypto influencers become much more powerful, with the ability to directly influence the price on memecoins, projects, and cryptocurrencies just with a tweet. Trait sniping was an example of this early 2021, people with technical knowledge sniped rare NFT traits by reading the smart contract metadata, this knowledge led them to peak through the revealing process and select all of the high-quality NFTs (plums) that sold for hundreds of thousands of dollars, while leaving the rest of the lemons for everyone else.

A technical person is going to have far more knowledge than a non-technical person when it comes to engaging with and building digital money and digital products. You don't need to know how to drive to buy a car (non-technical), but you need to know how to repair a car (technical) and that knowledge can be purchases fairly cheap on the market. According to Coinbase, despite the rise of Bitcoin and Ethereum, along with the emergence of new categories like DeFi, NFTs, GameFi and DAOs, Web3/Blockchain developers represent less than 1% of the 31.1M software developers globally. When you separate the raw talent from the user's who may know very little or nothing at all, plus the addition of KOLs leading people down rabbit holes, you realize the biggest problem in crypto is the literacy gap, which could lead to the downfall of blockchain technology's reputation.

As someone who's seen Playboy, Nike, Coinbase, build onchain in the space, I understand how difficult it is for brands to fight for placement. Because majority of us players and champions hold decentralization as one of the most important pieces of the industry. But seeing celebrities come into the space, make a memecoin then leave, I've seen multiple races to the bottom. Trading coins and art with no valu, creativity, or no use-case (AKA Vaporware). Sometimes it's the managers running the accounts and not the celebrities, and it's because these haphazard use-cases are so LOUD in the ecosystem, they heavily stain our most important asset, our reputation. KOLs get it wrong because greed corrupts.

We don't grow up accessing knowledge on taxes, credit, or economics in school.. unless we pay to go to college for business, which is gate-kept. Now, we can access the books for free because of the internet, but I would say less than 1% of americans have taken advantage of this.

When we are young, we learn that knowledge is a beautiful, logical thing that anyone can use as he likes—provided, of course, we have the patience to read and think. This idea partly comes from parents, who always have something to say and invent reasons for us to study more, excel in exams, and so forth, but it’s also something we usually conclude on our own. Most of us decide in young adulthood that the ability to reason and understand is natural, human, and rightfully ours.

Unfortunately, this conclusion is incorrect. While some information is indeed available for free and even forced upon us in school, most economically valuable knowledge is private property and secret.

In 2010-2020, we were so blindsided by the acceleration of social media influencers because we became numb to "following" instead of leading and being sensitive to the fact that we were being led into political nudging videos and topics that distorted our beliefs incorrectly, made us believe school shootings were happening more than ever, we needed to break from the herd and COVID-19 was the event that disrupted that conditioning for us.

Kanye West was correct when he made the Donda School, it just wasn't the right time, it lacked the critical infrastructure of decentralizes storage. However, schools gatekeeping of information mixed with systematic injustices is almost finally coming to an end.

Blockchain libraries and decentralized education such as built onchain by Mental Wealth Academy, are key indicators that society is shifting in a way where college can actually be left behind, where the location of the students doesn't interfere with the ability to learn, access resources, or access capital. The gate-keeping of plums (college books) and no lemons in the market that once forced us to pay to graduate college has come to an end, it no longer suffices.

It is due to the lending system that libraries are not allowed to reproduce books or digital e-books, despite being the only way to repair and continue sharing the knowledge, however the trojan horse with blockchain is that we can solve the digital lending problem while still providing every single child with access to the book via decentralized storage and the CID numbers that are located with the content. By utilizing this, every child in the world can have access to information on psychology, sociology, statistics, finances, and more, to create the kind of life they may want to live but couldn't because of access.

† God is a Designer, and we’re all customers †

We live in a very rural area, the internet has blessed me with authentic connections to financially literate and success people, as well as tools and knowledge that enabled me to grow my skillset project, and brand myself well as a designer. I met great friends during my childhood online as I had no peers who had the tools or love for digital art like I did, it also eased the social anxiety.

It is through a series of unfortunate events that I also became aware of 4chan, and other racist types of groups of people later in life. These are usually older people who are burnt out and not able to properly socialize or find love in their real-life. These are the types of people that save your pictures, videos, track your location, try to talk to people you know through your social media, and end up threatening you in real-life.

If you've ever watched black mirror, or seen the advancements of AI technology, we aren't too far off from a society that can actually use those things to cause even more psychological harm for people, the weaponization of information is deadly in a growing online society and an AI program and your picture could actually mean the end of reputation and the proliferation of fake content, nudity, and rumors. Which is why I believe it is wise to stay anonymous in the world of crypto.

First impressions, appearances, and stereotypes often get in the way and block us from truly connecting to others in an authentic way, and that’s an attribute that's built into the internet, anonymity, privacy, and cryptography that we use in the Web3 industry.

Brands have been the cause of cult-like communities spreading like wildfire. The proliferation of content, its reach, both in Web3, and traditional media has evolved due the profoundness of what some people call “the IKEA effect”. The IKEA effect is a term that refers to how special things feel and become to us when we invest our time & energy to make them, they become more meaningful.

NFTs are great ways to get connected with communities and gain access to events. There's also other incentives such as; airdrops, tokens, and trading have also been other pieces to the IKEA effect that motivated me to continue building in a niche tech space people refer to as blockchain technology or Web3, because I've witnessed the tools change people's lives across the globe from different cultures and groups dramatically.

Digital gentrification, but in reverse. So instead of locals being priced out, Web3 is giving power back to the people. In traditional gentrification locals are often pushed out as wealthier individuals move into their neighborhoods, driving up prices and making the area less accessible. But with Web3, the narrative flips. Instead of displacing people, blockchain technology can empower individuals by decentralizing control, creating financial opportunities, and democratizing access to creative and economic tools.

By putting your artwork onchain, and switching to web3 social media, you’ve tapped into a system that gives artists, writers, and creators direct control over their work, bypassing traditional gatekeepers and ensuring they benefit from their creations.

Warpcaster is the Web3 social media, it's like twitter and threads except it has built-in ways to utilize crypto and blockchain into your communities. However, just like any technology or tool the outcomes depend on how strong the bonds in your community are. Some are built on the exchange rates of currencies, others are built on real-life people getting their friends and hopping online in the world where all the cultures and coins are mixing together. It's imperative that we consider switching platforms because the power is in our hands, and as companies collect more and more data and show you advertisements, your data is the product, sold and edited in the algorithm to keep you coming back for more.

Data privacy became a major topic for me when I saw that BetterHelp, one of the world's first online therapy apps was caught selling user-data to Facebook, in order to better target individuals with advertisements. Wether it's trying to serve it's users best or a breach of privacy is for you to decide.

I focus on books, knowledge, and education because I'm a disruptor. I'm hard-headed, hard-working, and I want to beat the system. And I believe that web3 has the ability to change the trajectory of many people's lives in a great way that wasn't possible before.

I've met people from around the globe all on the computer I bought with a credit card when I didn't have the money, that investment has led to so many changes and the ability to utilize and learn tools I never imagined would bring me wealth. It's because of this deep multi-cultural and multi-economic model and being apart of it's ecosystem that I've grown a deep appreciation for what it can provide, how the tools can help us grow.

Currently the only decentralized solutions to books and libraries online have been services like The Internet Archive, which has faced just as much backlash as piratebay and torrenting sites. Currently the law of lending has been hindering creative expression and freedom of knowledge, it dampens it's ability to proliferate and thus, castrates the desire and importance of reading.

“When libraries add print books to their collections, these books don’t expire, even when they are damaged, lost, or stolen. Libraries have the specific statutory right to create new copies of print books and other media, because the preservation of knowledge, and making works available to the public, is core to both the mission of libraries and the purpose of copyright.

“With e-books, libraries have fewer options. When libraries want to add e-books to their collection, they can often only purchase a time-limited license, after which the books expire and have to be repurchased. The court recognizes that ‘the result is regular renegotiation of e-book licenses that often come at a steeper price and for a shorter term than print copies of the same books.’ 

“Controlled digital lending allows libraries to bypass unfair e-book practices by making their print copies of books more widely available. Today’s decision, if it stands, limits this. 

(Stella, “Second Circuit Decision”).

Because of the digital lending issue and the egos of writers tied to their work we have not been able to spread the knowledge of the best books, it's all been gate-kept behind brands and identities of key opinion leaders and books that have gained enough access to be popularized into a movie, which also begs to question of erasure and what happens to culture outside of America.

Utilizing DAOs or Decentralized Autonomous Organizational models, we have the ability to crowdfund, and collaborate with crypto without the use of GoFundMe protocols and without the need to pay these protocols 20% of the money raised for our medical bills. This creates a way for funds to go directly to those in need, which is crucial for medical expenses. Smart contracts on the blockchain ensure that all transactions are transparent and verifiable, building trust among contributors.

DAOs can tap into a global pool of contributors, allowing support from anyone interested in the cause, regardless of geographical boundaries. Contributors have a say in how funds are used and distributed, fostering a sense of community and shared responsibility. DAOs can implement unique funding mechanisms, such as token-based incentives or reward structures for contributors, encouraging ongoing engagement. Additionally, contributors can support causes without revealing their identities, which can be particularly appealing for sensitive issues like medical bills.

While utilizing DAOs for fundraising offers numerous advantages, there are potential challenges to consider. One significant hurdle is the technical barrier; many individuals may not be familiar with DAOs or the mechanics of participating in them, which could limit the pool of contributors. Additionally, regulatory uncertainty poses a concern, as different jurisdictions may have varying legal implications for raising funds through decentralized organizations. Furthermore, ensuring the sustainability of the DAO is crucial; maintaining ongoing engagement and support from contributors can be challenging, especially as interest may wane over time. Addressing these challenges through effective user education and clear communication about fund management can enhance trust and participation in the DAO model.

Mental Wealth Academy's proliferation has been somewhat dampened by the requirement of creating custom educational AI tools to expand the brand in a truly equitable manner.

Although the brand has pivoted from once trying to compete with BetterHelp, to books and digital education. I still feel very confident in the work that's been produced for both the community and the brand as a whole in just a short year. I'm excited to continue building and having you join us in targeting the educational barriers and giving tools to those who can access them.

Understanding knowledge as true wealth emphasizes the intrinsic value of information, skills, and insights in fostering personal and communal growth. In a world increasingly driven by digital assets and material gains, recognizing knowledge as a vital resource shifts the focus toward intellectual empowerment and collaborative learning. By expanding and proliferating the ethos of mental wealth, we create a culture that prioritizes education, creativity, and emotional well-being over mere financial success. This mindset encourages individuals to share their knowledge freely, cultivate diverse perspectives, and support one another in the pursuit of lifelong learning. Ultimately, valuing knowledge as true wealth not only enriches individual lives but also strengthens communities, paving the way for a more equitable and innovative future.

Hey, I’m Jhinn Bay, creator of Mental Wealth Academy and owner of Metawave Studio. My background is rooted in psychology and a passion for artistic expression, shaped by my family’s strong work ethic—my father is a U.S. veteran and my mother has worked at Pfizer for over 20 years. Guided by my relationship with God, and my battle with mental illness as a high-functioning 140 IQ schizophrenic. I focus on building equitable tools that empower the willing, hard-working, and empathetic people driven to excel to success.

I’ve specialized in Human-Computer Interaction and UX, with a keen understanding of how capitalism has weaponized social media for data exploitation. For the last four years, I’ve been immersed in studying the Psychology of a Global Onchain Economy. As a self-made business owner, educator, product designer, and leader in the crypto space, I’ve built everything from the ground up and continue to lead with vision and purpose.

You can view all progress of the project here: https://linktr.ee/mentalwealthdao

Doyle, Pat. “Nouns: A Structure for DAOs.” Amberdata Blog, 8 Feb. 2023, https://blog.amberdata.io/nouns-a-structure-for-daos.

Coinbase (2022) A simple guide to the WEB3 developer Stack, Medium. Available at: https://medium.com/the-coinbase-blog/a-simple-guide-to-the-web3-developer-stack-8364b612d69c (Accessed: 23 September 2024).

Boyan, A. (2024) Key opinion leaders are bad for the crypto industry, CoinDesk Latest Headlines RSS. Available at: https://www.coindesk.com/opinion/2024/09/17/key-opinion-leaders-are-bad-for-the-crypto-industry/?_gl=1*1p8jkiy*_up*MQ.._gaNjk4NDA2MzczLjE3MjY3NjE4MDc._ga_VM3STRYVN8MTcyNjc2MTgwNi4xLjAuMTcyNjc2MTgwNi4wLjAuMjM0MzMyMzY2 (Accessed: 23 September 2024).

Stella, Shiva. “Second Circuit Decision Limiting Book Lending Harms Libraries, Public.” Public Knowledge, 5 Sept. 2024, www.publicknowledge.org/second-circuit-decision-limiting-book-lending-harms-libraries-public/.