The more money I make, the more people I get to know. And it is always the same thing.
Crypto is a place of opportunities.
Get rich quick, and live to show off what you just did. Yet I have seen this same pattern way too many times to ignore it, and it is that money does not decide how happy someone is.
It does not decide how full their life feels.
I have watched, and gotten close with, so many people living this same pattern. And even for the ones who already made their life comfortable enough that they do not need more money, they keep looking for things outside of themselves. Like there is always something else they need to figure out before happiness can exist.
I did not plan to think about any of this. But it started with crypto.
The more I learned how crypto actually moves, the more I found myself pulled somewhere I never expected.
Into finance.
Into how this whole system we live inside is really built, and how it actually works.
How we as humans react and think.
I am just someone trying to understand what all of this is that we are dedicating our lives to.
The story we are actually writing together.
It all starts with capitalism
Capitalism, stripped all the way down, is a simple story.
You are allowed to own things.
You use what you own to make a profit.
And instead of spending that profit, you reinvest it to own even more.
That loop is the engine our entire modern world runs on.
And the part almost nobody in crypto wants to say out loud.
Crypto is the most capitalist thing ever built.
Think about it.
Private property has never been this pure. For the first time in history you can hold something that nobody can freeze, nobody can seize, nobody can print more of behind your back. Not a bank, not a government, no one. Just you and your keys.
And I am not the only one who says this.
The people who love crypto and the people who hate it actually agree on this one. Even its biggest critics call it hyper capitalist. They just say it like an insult, like it is the worst thing about it. I do not. I think it is one of the best.
Jackson Palmer, one of the two people who created Dogecoin. After years inside it he walked away, and called crypto “an inherently right-wing, hyper-capitalistic technology built to amplify the wealth of its proponents.”
Now look at Erik Voorhees, one of crypto’s earliest builders, who never walked away. He argues that a real capitalist system only works when the money itself is free from the state, market based, in your hands and no one else’s. He says it as the whole point.
One is running from it, the other is running toward it. And they are describing the exact same thing.
Why I take it, with no shame
The door that was always locked.
Because it is a redistribution.
For most of history the power to become wealthy, the power to actually own things, was locked inside a small group.
In the old days it was blood and title, kings and lords, land you were either born into or never touched. Later it became a few families, a few rich countries. Passed between the same hands, over and over.
Source: “Pyramid of Capitalist System”, 1911, Industrial Worker. Public domain.
Crypto cracked that open.
For the first time someone born far away from all of that, with no access whatsoever, someone like me, can reach it directly.
No permission.
No last name.
No passport that opens the right doors.
Just work and curiosity.
So I will never be the person telling you to stay poor to stay pure. Take it. Build the freedom. Get the life you were told was not meant for people like us. Take it, earn it.
Where it gets tricky
The same broken system that hoarded all that money for so long also sold us something else.
One single picture of what making it is supposed to look like.
The lambo. The watch. The number in the bank.
One size, for everyone.
That is success.
That is happiness.
And the funny part, if you really take the time to look deep and ask the right questions, is that you can clearly see nobody actually wants the lambo. They want what they believe the lambo will finally buy them. A life with no regret in it. A life with no shame in it. A life of waking up and not dreading the day.
Nobody is chasing the car. They are chasing the feeling they think is sitting behind it.
What I actually see
We are all so different. So completely unique.
And yet we keep trying to squeeze ourselves into one shared idea of success, without ever stopping to admit it was never going to fit all of us. It just can't.
The more I get to know my community, the people in my circle, the ones I trust, the more I see it plain. Success comes in every size, every form, every color. What makes one person feel alive would feel like a prison to another.
It is different everywhere I look. And that is not a problem to fix. That is the whole point.
The trap building right now
Which is exactly why the thing happening in crypto worries me a little.
This tool, maybe the greatest redistribution of ownership the world has ever made, is filling up with people using it for the one thing that was never going to make them whole.
They escaped the old game. They felt the door open. And then they walked straight back into the same trap, just with a new coin in their hand.
Same chase.
Same one size picture.
Same emptiness at the end of it.
And maybe that is the saddest part. Nobody truly wants that picture. We chase it anyway, because it is the one this society taught us to want. And now, in this new capitalist world of crypto, we are just reproducing the same lie.
Just faster.
What I want you to keep
So if there is one thing I want you to take from me, it is this.
Take the opportunity.
Seriously, take it. It is real, and it is yours as much as anyone's.
But any time you catch yourself staring at that one picture, the single way everyone says you are supposed to make it, stop for a second and remember:
it is not one size fits all.
You are allowed to find your own version of this. The one that actually fits you, not the one you were handed.
And if you want, come find it with me. That is the whole reason I am here.
References
Definition of capitalism: IMF, What Is Capitalism? and Britannica Money, Capitalism
Crypto as the purest private property, self-custody and resistance to seizure: Bitcoin Policy Institute, Self-custody is Nonnegotiable and Forbes, The Battle For Bitcoin Self Custody
Jackson Palmer on crypto as an inherently right-wing, hyper-capitalistic technology, X, July 14 2021: CBS News and Newsweek
Erik Voorhees on money as market based and the separation of money and state: Bitcoin Magazine and Unchained
“Pyramid of Capitalist System”, 1911, Industrial Worker, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
