How Crypto Has Created False Prophets of Expertise

Back in 2011 I knew a handful of people that were involved in the crypto space. Most of them where nerds or libertarians. Few were both. I rarely met anyone with deep understanding in cryptography, economics or politics. Fast forward a few years later after the valuation boom and we get all sorts of gurus and geniuses leading the space just because they were early in the speculation game - because let's admit it - so far, this is all there is to it.

The revolution in technology wasn't that advanced anyways. The only noteworthy part of the blockchain revolution (aka a slow distributed database) was Satoshi's white paper. Everything else after that point were minor improvements on the same concept that failed to gain worldwide momentum.

The "expert" problem is not only a problem in the crypto world but something that plagues human beings in general. For example, most superstitions are build from individuals we crown as "experts". Most people are good in let's say linguistics, or economics, or programming and for that they gain a public recognition. These people though also happen to have opinion about other subjects which they so often express. The public values their opinion about everything much the same since. After all, they are "experts" in ....something so they must somehow be "generally smart".

In this idiotic way, we see stupid beliefs such as with the case of black cats that are supposed to bring bad luck flourish. There is no evidence for such thing to be a fact, yet, just because an expert of the religious elite said so some time during the middle ages, it stuck into tradition and became a well known fact in the minds of most people. Such is the power of superstition.

This mode of thought creates problems for the individual. For example, it turns people into helpless pawns to the whims of so called experts. Let's take for example the case of the doctor. If a patient visits a doctor without researching a little about their situation, then whatever the doctor tells them it must be absolutely true - because after all - they are doctors, a well respected profession that only smart people do. This is how we end up trusting our most valuable asset, our health to just one opinion. We came to believe that a doctor must be smarted than us because society, the lazy masses, told us so. Truth is, every human body is different, most doctors see hundreds of patients a week and at some point everything becomes a number. Having an idea about our state of health beforehand can improve greatly the dialogue between doctor and patient and figure out if the doctor actually knows their staff or pays attention. If for example your quick search on the internet gives you more answers than your quick and expensive visit to the doctor then it will be a good idea to change doctors.

The way our society is structure relies heavily on expertise because we are trained since childhood to be good at one thing. This is socially more efficient since we can buy services from one another. Yet, this mode of living leaves us over-exposed to one another since most people know absolutely nothing about anything.

In our crypto world, we ended up with perhaps 40-50 leading figures that rule the space as early adopters. The rest of the culture relies on them in order to take decisions about ICOs, funding, technology, ideas, you name it. Most of them know almost nothing about how these things work and rather rely on their net-worth and social capital to appear experts about everything. The capital for almost all of them came because they were early adopters and just hodled one way or another. There was nothing brilliant about. Even early teenagers did the same. Most newcomers know very little about the space. If they research a bit they realize that these figures are full of shit. If they are not they end up funding scams that can even threaten the entire ecosystem if they collapse.

We have created these false prophets of expertise because of our gullible human nature. They are not going away because even if we know that they are full of shit, we will follow those projects because they will pump. It is in a sense a tragedy of the commons on steroids. Remember. Large companies like Google, Facebook or Amazon can hire their own developers, issue a coin and continue the blockchain revolution just as easy. There is nothing revolutionary about all those new coins popping up. The entire CMC can be included in Nasdaq and manipulated by few large funds. Most of this early blockchain technology will be obsolete in 2-3 years. These prophets of expertise will probably remain well off since they got in early. They can tag along with almost any venture. The ones that are fucked are those who follow them since they will most likely remain overexposed to their ignorant whims.