Maybe we are all depressed because we never thought about the impact that financializing everything will have - which pushes us into a mindset of seeing everything as a transaction or market interaction when stuff like upholding open source software is - at least by market logic - probably irrational because you ain't get paid except for in self-fulfilment and feelings of your actions having meaning (I assume)

Of course, it also hollows out any sense of community. And as long as we define "successful communities" by measures of scale I don't think we'll get away from that. It's just too tempting for founders looking to secure CEX listing to run a bunch of galxe quests to grow your wholly inorganic community of airdrop hunters to show off the thousands of excited "users".

The problem is that it kinda works I guess. Those are the people who get the money and the attention. It's just very depressing.

Maybe we are all depressed because we never thought about the impact that financializing everything will have

Yeah, that said I think the crypto space has a really strange way of financializing too because somehow it enables people who feel very self righteous about changing a norm that society normally doesn't permit. Somehow that's also why you can actually launch a racistly named memecoin and make a ton of money off of it without any social ostracisation because you can do it without connecting it to your future games or your reputation at all.

Just think about playing Monopoly in the degen way with your family. At the end of it everyone argues with you because it isn't your natural way of acting and so the second time playing they won't let you win anymore. We precisely get rid of this social correction function in crypto through pure anonymity. At the same time you could argue that people finally have to learn their lessons too. Maybe don't trust an anon with your life savings.

That said, I do think Vitalik has a point in his memecoin article. I shouldn't virtue signal how bad anonymity and memecoin launching is combined. I should rather work on playing and inventing games that pull people out of the anon+memecoin game.

The Modern Midas: A Crypto Fable

Alex was a brilliant developer who once coded for the love of craft. Frustrated by Big Tech's grip on innovation, he joined a promising crypto project built on principles of decentralization and community.

"What if we could reward genuine contribution?" asked a mysterious founder who called himself Satoshi's Disciple. "I can grant you the power to tokenize anything you touch."

Alex accepted eagerly. His first creations were beautiful—open-source tools turned into token-incentivized protocols. His GitHub lit up with contributions. VCs showered him with funding.

But soon, the Midas curse revealed itself. His beloved coding community fractured into token-holding factions. Former collaborators now wrote "AI slop PRs" just to farm his tokens. His elegant codebase bloated with pointless features designed only to "juice metrics for retro funding."

Everything he touched turned to tokens, but lost its soul in the process.

One night, exhausted from mediating a DAO governance dispute, Alex messaged his mentor.

"This isn't what I wanted," he typed. "Everything I loved about software — the craft, the care, the community — has been gutted."

"That's not crypto's fault," his mentor replied. "That's money. Money corrupts everything it touches."

Alex looked at his portfolio — worth millions — and felt nothing but emptiness.

The next morning, he published a scathing critique of what crypto had become and stepped away from his tokens. He started a new project with one rule: no tokenization.

Some called him a traitor. Others, visionary. But for the first time in years, he built something for love rather than profit, realizing that not everything valuable needs to be valued in coins.

[Thank you Claude ;) Reading the post and discussion I had to think of the ancient King Midas story, where everything Midas touches turns to gold. I fed this whole post and comments into Claude and prompted it to write a crypto version lol. Anyway old story!]

Wow, I'm kinda surprised to hear this from Lefteris, he's one of those pillars of the community you don't see ever despairing at things.

I can't quite remember, but the vibes feel worse now than in like 2019. Anyone else who was around for that feel the same?

I was around in 2019 but what was the despair about back then? I remember that it got pretty ugly around ETH 2.0 and Polkadot