📚Crypto Untangled

Your complete guide to the question, 'uh, what in the world is going on in crypto?'

I spent the first year of Untangled critiquing the social and cultural dynamics of crypto and blockchain technology. Crypto had captured the popular imagination — it was full of promise. Technical decentralization would reduce the power of Big Tech. Pseudonymity would enable real privacy. Smart contracts would obviate the need to trust the person on the other side of a transaction. But this future didn’t play out as promised. Instead, key players in the industry committed fraud and stole customer’s money. Others focused on the most speculative elements of the industry, betting on the future value of a jpeg. Crypto, in short, became synonymous with crimes and casino-like behavior.

Crypto is now back in the news. The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) begrudgingly approved a Bitcoin spot ETF on January 10th, allowing asset managers like Blackrock to offer their clients exposure to Bitcoin. At the same time, new blockchain-enabled projects are starting to generate modest revenue (e.g. Helium Mobile, Render, Hivemapper, etc.) and distributing value to users at the edges of the network. I’m not here to say ‘crypto is back.’ It’s not. The crypto industry has a very long road ahead if it hopes to earn the public’s trust and create real value in the world.

The most important step the industry could take now is to shed the techno-solutionist mindset prevalent in the sector, and instead grapple with how blockchains interact with social systems. This would require participants to take a hard look at the stories tell themselves, how their beliefs shape the use cases they pursue, how power is distributed across protocols and the broader industry, and how the affordances of blockchains interact with social systems like gender, race, and power.

I don’t have high hopes this will happen, but I decided to write Crypto Untangled for two audiences: people who want to understand what in the world is going on in crypto and industry participants who want to confront its blindspots head-on. The 60-page e-book is a collection of essays I’ve written over the last two years, broken down into thematic chapters — power, beliefs, and dynamics. Along the way, I explain key concepts like smart contracts, immutability, decentralized autonomous organizations, non-fungible tokens, pseudonymity, and social tokens. Each chapter includes a nice li’l introduction, followed by the essays. (You can buy Crypto Untangled separately or you can get a free copy by subscribing to the paid version of Untangled. Existing paid subscribers will get an email from me later today with their copy.)

That crypto followed the path of crime and gambling wasn’t preordained. Neither is its future. I don’t believe this is a field to write off altogether — yet. But it is a field that requires a lot of untangling.

Here’s an overview of the sections of the e-book:

Power

Power is invisible until it’s not -- until we interrogate the claims made about technology. In this section, I explore the theme of power -- how it interacts with blockchain technology, how it is wielded through narratives within the crypto community, and how it shapes our experience of crypto. Along the way, I explain concepts like decentralization, pseudonymity, identity, and overview research concepts and frameworks like techno-determinism, Afrofuturism, and context collapse.

Beliefs

Technologies aren’t neutral — they don’t originate out of thin air. They are informed by the values and beliefs of their creators and how those interact with the values in a given society. In this section, I explore the ideologies, values, and systems of belief that shape cryptography and blockchain technology. In particular, I analyze what a belief in ‘trustless’ systems means, how ‘digital ownership’ depends on a system of belief, and how ‘speculation,’ a belief and action wrapped in one, fundamentally shapes both crypto and modern societies. Along the way, I overview research concepts and frameworks like affordance theory and imagined communities.

Dynamics

Understanding the parts of a complex ecosystem won't help you understand how the system behaves. The macro behavior of a system can only be interrogated by understanding its dynamics. In this section, I explore the theme of dynamics -- how new incentives, institutions, and feedback loops are likely to shape crypto communities and the societal impact of crypto.

Along the way, I explain topics like social tokens, decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs), and decentralized finance (DeFi), and explore concepts explore conceptual frameworks like normal accidents and moral crumple zones.

Okay, that’s all for now. I’ll stop by next week with my ‘Crypto Reading List’ for paid subscribers.

I hope you enjoy the e-book.

Charley