learnonline

Why I stay in the crypto space despite all of the scammers and grifters

Last year $5.6 billion was stolen from Americans through schemes involving cryptocurrency [1] , so it is no secret that the crypto industry has its fair share of scammers, and yet I am still in the space because I think it has the potential to change education.

Currently, this coordination mechanism is being controlled by a central party, which is the reason for these problems. By keeping it in the hands of a few planners, it comes with all of the downsides of central planning which is that it's slow to change, siloed, and prone to corruption. So if you want to fix education, the job to be done is fixing the planning process and creating a better coordination mechanism.

As it turns out, you can move the planning process for the coordination mechanism into the public by using the blockchain. The blockchain, itself, is a database that anyone can access and make changes to. Even though anyone can make changes, you can trust that the contents of the database haven't been manipulated by any one person because of the security that the blockchain offers. Even if someone tried to corrupt the data, you would be able to track down the culprit because all of the changes are recorded.

This means that you can trust the data on the blockchain which means that you can bring significantly more people into the conversation. You can then aggregate all of the decisions to create a new set of standards, one that is dynamic and expansive. With it being dynamic, you can make education dynamic because you don't have to force everyone to conform to a narrow set of standards. By making the standards more expansive, you can then expand the horizon of exploration.

[1] https://apnews.com/article/cryptocurrency-fraud-fbi-report-29b412330ccebce946dec895f5060fd7?utm_campaign=TrueAnthem&utm_medium=AP&utm_source=Twitter
Credits to Midjourney

During the Covid pandemic, we saw that the important part about education was the degree because you could remove everything about education, move it all online, and people would still pay 50k for it. The reason for this is because the degree has network effects by acting as a coordination mechanism. It does this by providing a common set of standards which tells the students what they need to know and acts as a signal of competence for businesses. This creates a higher baseline level of trust and makes it easier to coordinate, but problems are starting to emerge.