Post-Truth Economy

Opens November 20th 2021 before Thanksgiving, back from Africa, reflecting on a Crypto Banter interview that made him think.

The gap between reality and its perception, seen in a Crypto Banter interview with Vinny and Bill, reflects humanity living in a post-truth economy.

People grew up believing hard problems like fusion reactors or going to Mars need interdisciplinary teams over a life's pursuit, yet now a billion-dollar unicorn means nothing, while Cardano brought together an army of top-tenured scientists with the best papers by citation and an army of engineers.

The community made Cardano self-sustaining with NFTs, airdrops, marketplaces, half a dozen DEXes, stablecoins, and oracles, things that would have been inconceivable for Ethereum a few years ago.

The Ouroboros protocol family solved decentralized consensus with dynamic quorums in a Byzantine environment, building a root of trust usable forever for property ledgers, voting, and central banks, the same feat that makes Bitcoin worth a trillion dollars, but with all the features maximalists wrote off.

The extended UTXO model is the most concurrent in existence via local state despite people claiming otherwise, and that smart contracts run today with Nami wallet and Space Buds, with throughput reaching a megabyte block every five seconds at 20 to 40x once pipelining and input endorsers land.

Parallel teams work daily on visible code and upgrades, but YouTube shows attack as if it does not exist then walk it back claiming everyone has done proof of stake, which they have not.

Crypto stands at the edge of a new reality: a post-truth world of no determinism where only opinions matter, versus accepting that hard things require hard work and time.

Mocks the fastest-cryptocurrency claim, saying if speed were all that mattered you would use Amazon Web Services for a million TPS, but real work means writing papers and getting third-party audits, not move-fast-break-things and burning tokens.

The post-truth mindset where feelings matter more than the papers, engineering, and auditability, and monetary policy changes on a whim to make money now.

Offers the alternative of thinking for yourself: checking daily roadmap progress, whether commitments are honored, the community is growing, and claims can be independently verified, plain old hard work.

The year's big boom was the worst thing for crypto, bringing a get-something-for-nothing mindset that the world changes instantly and everyone gets rich.

Lists real accomplishments the post-truth headlines ignore: Bitcoin's Taproot, Ethereum's ETH2 progress, Avalanche, Algorand, El Salvador adopting Bitcoin, and Cardano's Goguen smart contracts on extended UTXO.

Despite the noise Cardano never deviated from its roadmap, delivering Byron, Shelley, and Goguen with Basho and Voltaire ahead, so building on this granite lets you go to the Moon or Mars.

Warns building an empire on a principle-less ledger that changes on a whim with founder effect and insane distributions can be taken from you quickly, unlike granite like Khufu's pyramid enduring 4000 years.

Urges people to stop listening to soothsayers and propaganda and ask why they are here, what the philosophy is, where value comes from, and what makes good versus bad money.

Asks whether the US, European, or Chinese economy will still be healthy in 25 years, pointing to collapsing institutions with negative interest rates and money printing once only a far-right gold-bug fantasy.

Laments a post-modern culture with no heroes and only shades of gray, from The Commish to The Shield, where someone is always lying to you.

Warns that if you accept the cynical view, civil asset forfeiture and CBDCs let the government seize your money at the push of a button, and that COVID showed a nation-state can remove freedom of religion and assembly overnight.

The post-truth world is worsened by a wisdom gap, since humanity builds safety belts only after car crashes, and now faces AI, nanotechnology, synthetic biology, and gain-of-function as civilization-ending technology that cannot even be discussed.

Crypto is an open-source collective effort to chase objective truth, and the one thing they must get right is decentralization: fundraising via Catalyst, control via Ouroboros, governance via the hard fork combinator and CIP process, and research embedded in thousand-year-old, culturally-neutral universities.

No wealth is worth the abuse of a founder, with books calling Cardano a gambling coin, death threats, and letters with pictures of his family, so you must be here for the philosophy and vision.

Nation-states are taking it seriously, asking why their economy cannot run on rule of law given by math and protocols instead of paper constitutions, and that like Plato's cave you cannot go back.

Two million people are now an army, Cardano shipped Shelley to become the most decentralized consensus without a nation-state's energy use, and shipped smart contracts, though these models take time to wake up.

Visionaries saw what swampy Manhattan, desert Dubai, and Vegas could become, but instant-gratification land cannot understand that, while he has decided to be a lifer.

Warns that without a larger, more evangelistic ecosystem the powers that be will regulate crypto out of existence into a dystopian social-credit world whose tagline is you'll own nothing and be happy.

The powers in control are scared as their money and institutions lose legitimacy leaving only force and fear, and that being a billionaire under Putin or Xi is vacuous, citing Jack Ma and jailed or poisoned Russian billionaires, so property rights and liberty must be enshrined before they are lost in a generation.

For the first time in human history humans have a say in how they live and can build one global fair society, not a perceived fair world or an afterlife or an isolated commune.

Warns that early-20th-century Russians chasing utopia overthrew one dictator only to get a worse one, so the post-truth economy means living on Twitter and YouTube while objective reality means the hard, lonely road of writing papers, voting, learning ethics and governance, and the road less traveled that is the experience of a lifetime.