Gini is a Bridge

In the 1990s and early 2000s when I was in the Air Force and the Intelligence Community, I was responsible for giving intel and cryptanalysis presentations to 4-star generals who were often 2-3 times older than me. So, I know what it feels like to frequently be the youngest person in the room. In fact, one of the fun things about working in the Intel world is that it doesn’t matter how old you are; if you have the knowledge that’s necessary to advance or protect the mission, the old generals have to swallow their pride and listen to the youngsters. The same is true in any well-run organization, including the Gini Foundation.

Those who have read Broken Capitalism: This Is How We Fix it know that I’ve been able to cram a lot of life experience into my geologically short existence on this planet so far. This has given me a deep appreciation for aspects of human existence that many people don’t recognize until much later in life. The consequence of this is that I’m often more comfortable around people twice my age than I am around people my own age. It also tends to place me in the role of a bridge between generations, which is how I often feel about Gini’s role as an organization.

Data-Empty Babies. In the introduction of the Gini Book List, I described how the human brain is born in a data-empty state. The brain must be filled up with knowledge and life experience before the human can do anything useful. But if that knowledge and life experience is skewed toward a narrowly defined domain, such as abstract computer programming or math, then the human’s entire perception of reality will be skewed and oblivious to other important facts and realities. Thus, the acquisition of knowledge and the corresponding expansion of human awareness is a biological function of the amount of time a human has existed on Earth and the time they have devoted to absorbing all the knowledge and life experience necessary to accurately interpret reality.

Of course, that’s a fancy way of saying: We are all born stupid, and at some point, we must learn stuff; otherwise, we don’t know anything, and our perception of reality is guaranteed to be very limited and inaccurate with respect to anything that we have not already taken the time to study and learn.

Why is this important? Because one of the lamentable aspects of the cryptocurrency industry today is there is an abundance of very young and ambitious tech geeks who can write code all day long, but they spend little or no time studying economic and geopolitical history. That’s bad for the industry because it creates a strong industry bias toward building a bunch of technology without any meaningful purpose for humanity.

To be clear, I spend a lot of time in technical environments, immersed in code and technical architectural and economic analysis during most of my working hours; so, I certainly appreciate smart software engineers that can write code faster than me because I’m usually stretched between too many tasks to be able to write elegant, efficient code these days. In fact, the engineers on our Gini team are fantastic and exceptionally thoughtful, which of course is why they’re on our team! So, there are usually exceptions to every rule.

But what is most disappointing, is watching the cryptocurrency industry headlines over the past decade usually dominated by a tiny number of young, testosterone-filled guys with huge egos fighting over bragging rights about trivial nonsense that has virtually no meaningful impact in the real world. I've seen this cause many people to avoid cryptocurrencies; and I suspect it has been a major turn-off to the other ~99% of humanity who has not yet had any significant exposure to cryptocurrencies.

Additionally, over the past couple years, the gigantic vampire-squid banks have started jumping on the cryptocurrency band-wagon; and when they jump into any new industry, they almost always destabilize and corrupt it by injecting it with all kinds of toxic incentives and conflicts of interest. So, the state of the cryptocurrency industry today is disgusting to anybody who appreciates the technology but also sees the industry within the broader scope of economic history.

More specifically, it’s disgusting to see such a profound opportunity to bring all these talented people together to do something really important with the technology essentially squandered because most (not all) creatures in the industry today are here just to get rich quick. They’re not willing or able to confront and solve the truly significant problems plaguing humanity today.

Watching the cryptocurrency industry self-destruct is one of the reasons we launched Gini. As should be clear from the Gini whitepaper, Gini truly is different from other cryptocurrency projects in nearly every conceivable way. So, for those humans who have given up on the rest of the cryptocurrency world, please don’t throw the Gini out with the bathwater.

In other words, please give Gini a chance and spend some time exploring the Gini website. Gini really can serve as an important bridge between generations. It can also be an important bridge for the other ~99% of humanity that has been sitting on the sidelines wondering when somebody is going to make cryptocurrency technologies relevant and important to them in their daily lives.