Crypto's true telos is possibility, not perfection

Telos (n): the ultimate aim, purpose, or end goal of an action, process, or existence. It's often used to describe the final cause or ultimate objective that drives behavior or development.

Crypto seems to be having an existential crisis at the moment. Consider what @Travis_Kling, a crypto entrepreneur had to say about it in his multi-part series on what's wrong with Crypto:

"...All of a sudden, your life’s work starts to feel like mostly a waste. You don’t like what crypto has to show for itself and you don’t like the direction that it’s headed..."

The quote was in reference to the endless grift that seems to be uniquely enabled by crypto. Kling is exasperated that NFTs, memecoins, a large chunk of DeFi amount to nothing but financial nihilism - nothing seems to matter to crypto builders and participants other than the endless pursuit of money for its own sake. Because why bother?

While this is a fair assessment of the state of a large number of participants, it also largely misses the point. When you go about building a permission-less, censorship-resistant financial system, you cannot expect it to be used only for things that you approve of or deem meaningful. The "Permissionless" part cannot be caveated.

You might want people to exclusively build and use products that meaningfully shift the status quo towards 'better' outcomes, but you don't get to choose if the system is truly permissionless.

I think that people who participate in this space, either as speculators, technologists, investors or curious onlookers (and to a certain extent, policy makers) would to well to keep this paradoxical nature of crypto in mind.

Crypto's telos (as understood through the lens that Travis and other Crypto Utopians talk about) is at odds with what people are choosing to do with it.

Perhaps it is because utopian ideals fail to account for the baser aspects of human behavior. Or perhaps because crypto is merely reflecting the larger malaise of nihilism that is infecting society as a whole and crypto merely provides tools to express this faster and cheaply.

Regardless of the reason for it, looking at crypto as a utopian project that must be rehabilitated to its ideals is a doomed task. A more realistic and sustainable way to look at crypto is looking at it as a tool for optionality.

You have the option to build systems that are more egalitarian, less extractive and frankly in a lot of applications (such as verified human content, micropayments) the only scalable way to do it.

As long as you have optionality via crypto, and the trend towards that looks healthy, crypto is succeeding. Not wholly, but enough to matter.

If there is anything that has been true so far in crypto, it is that it is cyclical. Sentiment, in-fighting, idealism - everything has it's seasons in crypto. And so far, this has been tied to the price action of the monetary instruments that crypto enables.

The hand-wringing in crypto halves when BTC doubles in price. I expect this to be the case this time as well.

But if you want to keep an even keel when the price invariably dips or when we eventually have a failed cycle, you would do well to keep an eye on the trends that truly matter - the option to self custody, the option to transact with peers, the option to host a node and speak freely, and so on.

It's true that a lot of these are under attack, and that's a challenge that the space has shown it can confront well. If nothing else, it only goes to show how these primitives are truly meaningful and game changing.

It's better to view crypto's telos as the possibility of exit, not the wholesale overthrow of existing systems in the short term. As long as those possibilities remain open, crypto’s promise remains alive.