Evangelism > Sugar Coating
I'm honestly not convinced we're going to bring the next bazillion people onchain by sugar coating crypto
Yes we need to improve the UX
Yes we need to make it safer
But are we making users more free?
What if the best way to onboard someone is to explain why you go into crypto?
I worked in a customer service call center at a local bank for 4 years. One of our biggest sources of income? Fees. Users who didn't want their card charges declined could opt into a system that let them go into the negative by an amount determined by their risk factor. For some it would just be $500 because their deposits were low, for others it was $2000. Every time they went into the negative they paid the bank $35.
This safety net became a crutch. People living on the poverty line would develop a pattern of getting a deposit, going into the negative, and then the next deposit would cover the the negative balance, and if their coverage algo would allow it they would go back into the negative for X amount. That was the big "if". I can't tell you the number of old widows and single mothers who would start crying because their coverage wasn't the same amount it had been for months, and now they had no idea how they would afford food or their electric bill. You can try to pass blame on personal responsibility or money management, but imo it was institutional and predatory for a bank to profit off that behavior.
The truth of crypto is that it isn't "normal," it's revolutionary. Much like cryptography in the 90s it's radical. It's freedom.
We still have a lot of work to do. While most crypto can make users more free it certainly isn't safe. I'm not at a point where I feel comfortable trying to convince a normie to get into crypto, but I will unabashedly tell them why I'm working in this space. I want people to understand that this space is more than just monkey pictures, scam tokens, and online casinos. We can do better.
Make users more free
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