Crypto’s inherent optimism is a social good in its own right

Belief is the most powerful agent for change there is.

It is front and center in the market’s embrace of a reconfigured world on the blockchain, where work, money and our social order have been reimagined within a tokenized society.

This is a bit hyperbolic and aspirational I admit.

But it is as well somewhat true and formative to the market reality of what is coming.

This cultural phenomenon is like nothing I’ve experienced, dwarfing the optimism and excitement that we participated in at the dawn of the web in the 90s.

If you don’t go to crypto and blockchain Meetups, you should. They are the true Petri dish of this cultural change.

A month ago, in Santa Monica, I sat in an all day Saturday crypto Meetup. Some speakers were quite brilliant, some simply misinformed, some hyper-enthused cyber-punks spouting Libertarian absolutes, headlined by a local comedian now a crypto investor.

The audience was a crazy mix of developers, job seekers, developers, 20-somethings trading alt-coins and high-fiving each other. People from their teens to their seventies anxious to learn and feel connected. The most optimistic group I’ve stepped into since the early days of orgs like the Computer Game Developers Conference in the 90s.

The mood of the room was an anything-is-possible mantra, collectively self-empowered. A group introspection on how each person could contribute, change how they work and make the world a better place.

It’s the same at Meetups everywhere. Some more technical, some more investing based, some simply a happy hour at a Manhattan rooftop bar for ‘crypto believers’ and even a blockchain hiking group in the Adirondacks.

I love this.

Crypto as an idea and its social impact on what our lives could be has galvanized and refocused an era, not simply a niche or tech population.

In the process, it is instantiating a massive heterogeneous and inclusive community of enthusiasts that includes just about everyone. Cross work segments, age brackets, background, status, race, gender or nationality.

It’s overplayed to call this a democratizing revolution, but in actuality, as a cultural concept, it is just that.

The size, the enthusiasm, the inclusiveness of this will transform the market. It will elevate marketing as a discipline to a community-based model by its very dynamic, shifting the power of brand creation from established bohemeths to an innumerable number of smaller platforms and brands each jostling for a piece of this wildly horizontal community.

What’s crazy is that this energized positivity has already evolved to a community-based global movement. In advance of productization of the technology itself.

The possibilities of a crypto incentivized market are easy to embrace as an idea but not at all simple to build. This is really inspiring, but really hard shit to figure out.

It will take more than a village.

It will take all of us–game theorists, cryptoeconomic experts, mathematicians, legal visionaries, creative marketers and content creators, and an army of developers, new gen community strategists, and artists to memorialize our experiences along the way.

Not to mention a massive population of forgiving, energetic users willing to change their current behavioral habits and their favored platforms to try something new.

There are no experts here. The next generation of knowledge will be created by this first generation of people that are doing something completely different today.

There is a self-actualization piece of the community puzzle as well.

By its very definition, the panache of this space eschews triviality and easy answers. But it liberates the reality of possibilities to literally reconfigure our world in unheard of, unimagined ways.

That’s the promise. The collective belief and cultural optimism that tokenized platforms for social change carry with them.

Where every one of us is qualified to participate in some fashion, making each person in effect a contributor, a beneficiary and also ultimately responsible.

This is the transformative social power of crypto and the blockchain.

And why through all the craziness, the crap of the fraudsters, the insane fluctuations of the currencies, it is a net positive. Because the process itself is forcing us to be more collective, more positive, more focused and more inclusive.

That’s the definition of a community at its core.

The reason why as a long-game play, this is well worth digging in for the ride.