The psychology of a no-coiner

TL;DR: Crypto is an instrument to implement free and efficient capital markets. We're at a point in the world where, for one reason or another, most people are against that. E.g., our biggest haters, the Buttcoiners, are mostly authoritarian socialists who refuse to address either the theoretical or the practical problems associated with their economic worldview.

I spend a lot of time thinking about where the disconnect is b/w us (as crypto-bros) and no-coiners. Particularly, I try to put myself in their headspace and consider what goes through their minds in thinking about the problems we're trying to solve.

At this point, it's pretty clear that something major is wrong with the world; wealth inequality is at an all-time high, people are polarized on just about every major issue, and that's just in the US (other places in the world have it far worse). We seem to end up having disagreements on why that is, though...

The crypto-bro would argue that it's due to an overreaching sovereign state that uses public debt and inflation to rob the general public of its spending-power (i.e., the Fiat-Ponzi). The thing is, if someone thinks in that direction, they're generally labeled as libertarian nutjobs who wants tech companies to be akin to Samurai warlords or something.

Granted, a lot of us (myself included) do lean libertarian, but crypto is all about decentralized governance; what we want a governance structure that is truly democratic by ensuring decentralization in every aspect of its being. In other words, we don't necessarily want there to be no governance structure at all (a belief followed by objectivists in the style of Ayn Rand); we want a structure that, unlike America, is actually "of the people, by the people, and for the people", and we use decentralization as a means to that end. The US doesn't follow those principles itself anymore, despite how it's marketed; just like most or all other sovereign states at this point, it's a big hegemony by the banks, the military, the tech companies and pharma companies, the meatpacking plants, etc. (abbr. The Powers that Be).

With that said, there are some people who are averse to even the idea of escaping tyranny. I broadly classify this group as the Woke Left, but I'm really talking about anyone who believes that the state's role is to establish material egalitarianism and shut down independent economic actors. I'm not using the word "socialist" here b/c socialism refers to a system of enterprises controlled by communities of individuals rather than by whichever entity has the largest pool of capital (which is pretty close to what a DAO is, assuming that voting is actually decentralized).

What these people don't understand is that material egalitarianism is a counter-incentive to productive labor, i.e., you can't incentivize people to work hard if the hard-workers know that the fruits of their labor are going to be redistributed to others in a way that's out of their control. Over time, the hard-workers/high-producers crucial to your materially-egalitarian economy will leave for another jurisdiction that gives them a capital incentive to do a good job in their work.

This effect is called "Brain Drain"; it's a well-documented phenomenon in India, the Netherlands, etc. It's an extremely cogent argument against materially-egalitarian socialism, but most self-proclaimed "socialists" label it as "boring" b/c it assumes that people are all rational economic actors (who they just think of as "evil").

When it comes to crypto, you'll ultimately only think it's valuable if you think of property rights as valuable. Crypto is the only asset in all of human history that cannot be seized by widespread violence (unlike gold, as we saw in the government seizures preceding WWII); thus, it is the most, and perhaps the only, truly secure right to property.

Some people like Kevin O'Leary, despite being capitalists, disagree with that b/c they're apologists for the present state and its institutions, while others are materially-egalitarian socialists and disagree with it on principle. It's your choice to decide whether you believe in that or not; I know I've made my choice.