Really enjoyed Vitalik's interview (creator of ETH) on the Tim Ferriss podcast, specifically this excerpt
So I do have another answer to the question of what contrarian things or what things are you thinking about that other people are not thinking about yet? I think this is kind of taking a kind of cultural and social context a serious way, right? Which sounds obvious, but in some ways it really isn’t right? Even within the crypto space, I feel like a lot of people insert in their models of “Is Bitcoin going to beat governments?” Or “Are these things going to be censorship-resistant?” They tend to look at it purely from a technical point of view, and they basically are kind of implicitly assuming that governments are going to try as hard as they can. And the crypto space is going to try as hard as it can. And it’ll be a battle and one side and that person’s preferred side is going to win. But the reality is that governments are not trying as hard as they can. And a big part of the reason why is that government is not even so much an entity as it is a battlefield, right? And like what are the soldiers fighting on the battlefield? A lot of it is just the cultural movements and a lot of the success of cryptocurrency and blockchains I think really have to do with the way that they have kind of interplayed with a lot of the important cultural trends of the last 10 years. Including things like people’s distrust of financial institutions after 2008, I think people’s distrust of centralized tech companies after 2020 is also going to play a big part. Also, just another fascinating thing, I think, is one thing that surprised me is how cryptocurrency managed to appeal to a lot of people who would not normally think of themselves as libertarians. And that’s something that I think did end up even blindsiding a lot of people. And the reason why that happens has to do with kind of very deep and specific aspects of how people think and kind of how people think ideologically, right? A lot of people think of, say authoritarians, for example, as just people who hate freedom and want to restrict things. But the reality is there’s lots of people who are in favor of very specific restrictions or even in favor of restrictions that benefit their own team. But they’re very easily flipped to being very pro-freedom when they know it’s their own team that’s being threatened. Or even when you just kind of take things out of the cultural context of what should the governments do and into the cultural context of how should technology work? So there’s a lot of these kind of very subtle effects that determine, whether blockchains and some of the ideals behind blockchains that kind of succeed and fail. And these are kind of very subtle properties of how humans think and even how humans interact with each other are just extremely important in a lot of ways. And the reason why they’re important is they just determine that the effectiveness with which people can coordinate, right? Humans are naturally very attuned to a kind of social trend and humans have a lot of motivations that have to do directly with what position they have within social trends and contexts that are made up by other people. And this is just a space that the blockchain and cryptocurrency space is going to navigate well. And if it navigates it poorly, then I think blockchains will be stopped by governments, or they won’t be stopped entirely, but the amount of usage can easily be more than 90 percent lower than it otherwise would be. But on the other hand, if blockchains can successfully show to a kind of large enough coalition that this is valuable, and this is a good thing for the world, then they can be very successful. This is just something that the space needs to have a better understanding of and take seriously.