💠 The Etherean & American Dream 🇺🇸
💠 The Etherean & American Dream 🇺🇸
Previous generations ventured West searching for gold nuggets in the Californian hills. Today, a new generation venture upwards into the Ether where they are developing a new digital world ⛏
Etherean : American
Ethereum : America
Ether : Dollar
Node : Court
Code : Law
Gas : Tax
ETH : USD
DAO : LLC
NFT : MP3
POS : MAD
.ETH : .COM
ERC20 : NYSE
Community : Country
Protocol : Constitution
Looking back, it is easy to see the results of moving my body to America and brain to Ethereum. Both offer a frontier. America has always been the catalyst of liberal democracy, decentralised governance, and hyper-competitive capitalism. Ethereum is becoming a credibly neutral digital substrate that lives above countries’ jurisdictions on the Internet.
What has become much clearer to me over the years is that The American Dream and The Etherean Dream are very much the same:
👑 Derision of Monarchs 🗳
America was born by telling the British monarchy to jog on. They absolutely despised despotic rule and wanted the opportunity to self-govern. In a similar fashion, Ethereans generally loathe our current digital overlords like Mark Zuckerberg. We want to allow people to express their opinions more freely.
📜 Strong Property Rights 🏛
Built into the core of American and Etherean life is a deep sense of property rights. In America, those are connoted through the rule of law. On Ethereum, they are enshrined through unstoppable code running powerful encryption algorithms. Each system offers the opportunity for massive gains or terrible ruin. You are in control of your own destiny, for better or worse.
🛶 Adventure Capitalism 🛸
The best Americans and Ethereans I know are crazily adventurous. They fund wild charitable experiments, back the most unproven founders, and get involved in some of the most extreme sporting activities I have ever seen. They are funding healthspan extension technology, young kids who have nothing but a dream, and building projects that scale exponentially every year—it is wild. At their core is a sense of adventure: these people have benefited enormously from their understanding of capital. Now they want to use that energy to make things better for others.
🥽 Explore Failure Freely 🧪
If you go bankrupt in America or get hacked on Ethereum, the attitude of the people is amazing. As long as you are ethical and open, the community will forgive you. If your startup incinerates $50+ million but you did your best—that is fine! If your smart contract has a dumb bug that costs everyone hundreds of millions, we all learn together.
🛂 The Cost of A Dream 🏦
The American Dream is increasingly inaccessible to the global population
If you want to have a shot at The American Dream, you need to get a visa, a job, and some dollars. If you want to have a shot at The Etherean Dream, you need to get a wallet, an internet connection, and some Ether.
Ethereum’s Virtual Machine (EVM) has permeated across many other systems. Protocols with different sets of trade-off’s have absorbed it as a standard which makes it easier for people to explore other areas of opportunity. Just as a US passport gives you access to many countries. An Ethereum wallet gives you access to many protocols.
We need to make it easier for anyone on the planet to navigate this bewildering set of opportunities. A lot of people have access to a mobile device and the internet now. Onboarding them into affordable and usable parts of the Ethereum ecosystem is going to be a multi-decade mission which we should all embrace.
💠 I am more Etherean than Briton 🇬🇧
My strongest allegiance is to a software-based protocol and its community, not a country
My gut tells me we are starting to align around algorithms over nations. Humans are being drawn to digital structures on the internet over physical structures in real life.
I identify as an Etherean over a Briton. I care more about my protocol than I do about my home country. Governance decisions made by the Ethereum community matter far more to me than the British ballot box.
I think this trend will continue as more people start to find financial freedom from protocols. Some day, more people could be employed by protocols, DAOs and dapps than companies, governments and international organisations. That shift will reframe how we think about the governance of everything—physical and digital.
☢️ America’s Physical Machine & Ethereum’s Virtual Machine 🎛
America uses physical power to define the world. Ethereum uses digital power to do it.
Every day, thousands of people get into nuclear bunkers to defend Americans’ rights around the world. What America says goes. Their two coasts, incredible natural resources, ridiculous nuclear arsenal, and super-charged governance system mean that the country is ultra-dominant on the world stage. America sets the standards for the physical life today.
Ethereum’s Virtual Machine is setting the standards for our virtual lives:
ENS - Ethereum Name Service > Social 🫂
DAO - Distributed Autonomous Organisation > Political 🗳
ERC-721 - Non-Fungible Tokens > Cultural 🖼
ERC-20 - Fungible Tokens > Financial 🏦
In each case, Ethereum has bent humanity to its will. Ethereum’s standards are becoming humanity’s standards. Code that runs above the political system is more powerful than the countries beneath it.
Even though I knew this was the intent behind Ethereum, I only just started to appreciate the power of this protocol. The protocol defines how people interact on the internet. It gave us property rights, governance systems and a digital jurisdiction for every online soul.
🫂 Want Share The Etherean Dream? 🌎
The Safari Wallet community is focused on bringing the best of Ethereum to the best mobile software platform on the planet.
The Safari Wallet community is laser focused on bringing Ethereum to every iOS device possible—from a $199 iPod Touch to a $1500 iPhone. We believe that Apple has created the most secure substrate for Ethereum’s development. As people move their digital life onto Ethereum, they will seek out the best products to use the protocol. We know a second-hand iOS device is safer than many of the latest Android devices. Our mission is to inspire every wallet creator in the world to do better. We are an open source, community-funded, decentralised organisation from day one.
If you are interested in The Etherean Dream, join our Discord: https://discord.gg/safari-wallet
Na. Real experience still wins for me, not as a digital add-on. So much of the mentality seems infected with the idea that you can escape your physical bodies digitally. And then the tax man looks at your addy with all your transactions public for all to see.