I’ve written extensively about my experience seeing the crypto light, and why others struggle to see it. This post is about why, when people see the crypto light, everyone sees something different.
The Blind Men & An Elephant
The genesis of this post was the result of reading an interesting post by Casey Caruso “The five camps of crypto”. In the post, she includes a picture depicting the parable of the blind men and an elephant:
The parable originating in India is a story of a group of blind men, who have never come across an elephant and who learn what the elephant is like by touching it. Each blind man feels a different part of the elephant’s body, such as the side or the tusk. They then each describe the elephant to each other based on their experience. The men are surprised that their descriptions of the elephant are so different from each other. They even suspect the others may be lying. The moral of the parable is that humans tend to claim absolute truth based on their limited, subjective experience as they ignore other people’s limited, subjective experiences, which may be equally true. Here’s another picture depicting the same phenomena:
While “the angle” at which your looking at crypto explains a small part of why everyone sees something different when they see the crypto light, I think there are two more dominant reasons, that in combination, are driving this phenomenon.
1. Crypto Offers Infinite Possibilities
First, when I say “crypto”, I’m referring to a set of new technologies (blockchain, cryptocurrency, smart contracts, zero knowledge proof..) that together, are the next computing platform, enabling new types of business processes (e.g. decentralization), that were never possible before.
As a smart contract is simply an if-this-then-that statement, it enables anything, to do anything, be anything. The possibilities are infinite. That’s what is so remarkable about this technology.
2. We See The World, Not As It Is, But As We Are
While the possibilities of crypto are infinite, there is no such thing as reality. There is only ‘your’ version of it which is essentially your perception. And our perception is based on our life experience. The simple truth is that everyone has a prism through which they see the world, based on their life experience.
So when my CryptoOracle partner, Dr. Alex Cahana saw the crypto light he saw how it could solve the intractable problems that plague healthcare.
When Unicef’s Chris Fabian saw the crypto light, he saw how it could give identity to over 20 million kids who don’t have identity papers.
For me, the second company I ran, Bolt, an early leader in social networks. Thus, when I saw the crypto light, I saw the unique importance of community in crypto as it relates to the success and failure of projects.
If you haven’t seen the crypto light, follow the top 50 crypto bloggers on Medium, and every day you’ll get an email packed with insightful crypto posts, some of which will speak to you based on your life prism. Spend time every day to read some posts. Do the work. Open your mind.
Minds are like parachutes; they work best when open — Thomas Dewar
Because more and more people are seeing the crypto light and bringing their own unique perspectives to solving our challenges, I’m confident that crypto is a thing, a BIG thing.
#CryptoIsComing, and I’m pretty sure, it’s going to make the world a better place.
Reprinted by permission.
