There’s No Such Thing as ‘Pro Crypto’ (and That’s a Good Thing Too!) | Brian Norton - MyEtherWallet

[Music] ladies and Gentlemen please welcome to the stage Brian Norton with my ether wallet for there's no such thing as Pro crypto and that's a good thing [Applause] sorry one moment and there we are all right uh thank you everyone my name is Brian Norton I am the CEO of my ether wallet I have been in that role since 2018 and since I've given a good number of years of my life to this space one would probably assume that I would qualify myself as being pro crypto but as you can probably tell from the title of this talk there's no such thing as Pro crypto and that's a good thing too um my job for the next 10 to 13 minutes or so will be to convince you that there's no such thing and so I'm not for crypto and neither are you so let's get started um so I brought up my title a couple seconds ago and uh it's it's pretty Snappy and I wish I could take credit for it but I ripped it off I ripped it off from a gentleman named Stanley fish he is a 86-year-old cultural critic literary scholar and popular philosopher um he was also the uh uh dean of the College of Arts and Humanity when I was at the uh uh University of Illinois Chicago and you can look that up if you want um and uh when he was a 56-year-old literary theorist um back in 1994 he wrote a essay and then a book entitled there's no such thing as free speech and that's a good thing too um I mostly like the title but as it turns out it was a critique of the culture wars that were beginning to brew up um in the United States um around 1990 uh like in the early 990s during the Clinton era and uh what was interesting about it is is he really dug into like the sort of like politization of certain terms that you would probably know now know now as like politically correct or merit-based things that were sort of popularized within the culture war in order to sort of put down other uh other positions and um make them seem unreasonable by making an appeal to a more neutral Authority which is what you want um so fish argues that these terms serve primarily as window dressing for a particular value set and being presented as neutral appeals to ration analogy which is the ideal in public discourse so in revisiting this 30-year-old work of CR uh critical theory I was struck by two things just how effective this weaponization has been over the last three decades and how we're seeing the same sort of weaponization of ter terms uh within political discourse in the crypto space um and that politization is beginning to spill out into the Normy World um so what are we saying when we say something is pro crypto well late last year when I was in bang uh Bangkok I kept hearing this refrain after the reection well now that the US is pro crypto us is crypto friendly now like and I kept saying like just kept hearing this and nodding my head being like I don't know what these people mean nothing has fundamentally changed that this point um but as it turns out some when we say something Pro crypto we typically mean anything that is outside of this space that we as an industry deem as being beneficial that's politicians regulations institutions people inside of crypto are just seen as crypto-friendly by default and we don't really question um uh where their where their loyalties lie we have an assumption of a political alignment but the point is whatever make uh whatever make the world makes a in the world makes a for a more commiting place for the crypto industry that's what we consider Pro crypto but wait which crypto are we talking about here so in this past presidential election crypto Lobby has spent about $133 million after raising $197 million in support of allegedly Pro crypto candidates and it worked crypto lobbies everywhere they put their money they won they got Shad Brown out in Ohio and it worked all the way up into the White House and so and they won by a pretty big margin but who like who is the crypto Lobby what crypto is pro crypto is it circles is it pudgy Penguins is it my ether wallet I wish I had that kind of money but no no of course not it's uh it's the folks it's it's The Usual Suspects it's the coin bases of the world it's the Andre and horror wites Ripple was in for 45 million dollars and this isn't an indictment many of these people in these space are are are doing good projects I have a great working relationship with corn base myself and I plan to have some with for many many years to come but it's would be really really naive of me to assume that my little non-custodial solution like with it Scrappy team of 20 has a perfectly aligned politically is perfectly aligned politically with a company that has I think 54 billion market cap like we're probably going to diverge on a couple of points and so so what I'm trying to point out here is that just like big Pharma just like big a pro crypto Lobby it ain't you it ain't me it's somebody it is much much bigger powerful more entrenched players Peter teal was also heavily in P teal famously declared crypto is libertarian but what if that's not what your crypto is doing maybe that libertarian values are not the values that you are putting into your crypto product that's not the cultural values that you want to see reflected back to you in the blockchain space are you then no uh anti- crypto are you so the way standy Stanley fish would talk about this as uh so it's pure you know know so it was Pro crypto it's just not your crypto in his dissection of uh of the term Free Speech Stanley fish claimed that free speech is in a partisan debate is meant to appeel to rationality but there's no such like when when speech diverges we say something when we say something is Free Speech we're usually defending it against something else like you're wrong because you're wrong I'm right my speech is right and thus free speech and this is a way by which we can put a bull workk between ourselves between our speech and somebody else's um it's not that we can't say whatever we want it's that there are cultural values at play political cultural values at play all the time when we're uh uh when we're when we're interacting socially and we just like that just becomes part of the expectation he also said uh said like and this sums that up nicely if somebody if one yells free speech in a crowded courtroom and makes it stick the case is over now if you replace free speech with Pro crypto and courtroom with onx well you're basically all caught up that's where we are right now that's where we are in uh uh in the crypto uh dialogue political dialogue right now and you might say so what so speech is political entrenched interests are going to pay for what uh pay to see their uh their uh influence and their interests reflected back to them in Washington it doesn't really mean that much you know we can just put our heads down and keep building what we want to build well fair enough um but in the runup to 2024 us election balic published a Blog arguing against the choosing of political allegiance solely what he deemed as Pro crypto he made the argument that even if one was to limit the definition of pro crypto to the cipher Punk values that created crypto the bills that were being sort of touted as Pro crypto with stand with from like organizations like stand with crypto who are a generous uh backer of this conference and they do good work but he said that what these B bills were doing were woefully uh uh wul uh underdeveloped for projecting other types of Freedom other types of Technology rights and what he said basically and this basically sums it up freedom is important decentralized networks are good at protecting freedom and money is an important sphere where such networks can be applied but it's one important sphere amongst several this seems like a very reasonable measured position and to credit to their credit many on crypto Twitter gave a measured and reasonable responses but there were other responses and they were less measured and they were less reasonable and this is kind of what we this this is kind of what we like what was hit back with and we're still hearing this play out now it's sort of the before and after now I don't know about you I survived the mar Marxist infiltration of Denver this year I think you it looks like to me just looking at the crowd that everybody else faed okay as well so the idea that we should create a uh conceptually uh a credibly neutral uh Network by um by casting out casting out our uh our political Rivals people whose value sets don't come up with them smearing them smearing them it's a it's a novel take it's a novel take um but in a way this is perhaps what is that perhaps even more Grievous approp appropriation of on a conceptual level is this idea of credible neutraly for partisan political ends because whether it's a sincere assertion like trolling or just nihilistic Edge lordliness it serves the rhetorical function of just delegitimizing large swats of Engagement with crypto for their just for their ideological underpinnings but it does go much closer to the foundation because we're doing this on like the community level we're doing it on the protocol level this is not big business trying to infiltrate the government this is peers talking to peers trying to drive other PE other builders out and I don't know I don't know if we can build a credibly neutral global system on the subject of neutrality Stanley fish said you know no such thing as free non ideologically constrainted speech no such thing as a public forum Purge of ideological pressures or exclusions but I'm daring to say that I think that we still have the opportunity to do something quite Noble which is to create this credibly neutral global system where anybody absolutely anybody and any sort of value set from any other part of the world can be reflected by ethereum and other crypto projects and it doesn't matter it doesn't matter where they come from it doesn't matter uh rather than excluding different ideologies and value sets use cases diverse as universal basic income Collective resource allocation Defi and even Wild West meme casinos can compete on the value they provide to actual human beings and not be gatekeep by lobbyists Regulators P politicians ideologues or even edgelords on Twitter so there might not be such thing as Pro crypto but that's a good thing because once we get out of the pro crypto box we got let our IM Nations run wild and we can go and dream bigger and build better thank you very much [Applause]