A multi part series on PPP.
One of the most important things for me is to shift crypto from a PVP into a PPP mindset.
The difference:
PPP are by definition infinite games, while PVP are by default deeply finite games with a clear end point - the last sucker.
But why is PVP so prevalent , to the point where most outsiders and even many insiders feel that crypto is fundamentally a PVP game?
It is because PVP “communities” are super easy to form, since all the members need to agree on is to that attracting more people to buy their coin quite literally makes them richer (thanks to magic money creation) and so they should do a lot more of that.
In contrast, PPP communities are incredibly hard to build - since the core emphasis of the community cannot be around attracting others in the hopes of dumping of them, but rather towards having more allies towards building a common long term future together.
That said, the future of crypto is most certainly PPP, because even if 99.999% of new “communities” are PvP, the 0.00001% that lasts and thrives are certainly all PPP.
The hallmark of great communities like Bitcoin, Eth, Sol (and hopefully Jup) have been a community that is very aligned towards helping every single new entrant into the network win vs treating them as a pile of money to buy their bags.
PPP will win in the end, because:
Yet of course today, crypto has a really bad rap for being PvP, where the public perception is often that of greedy mofos creating and shilling magic internet money and saying anything in order to dump on the last suckers entering.
The core problem with that perception of course, is that there is a lot of truth to that to the point that even the most earnest participants often think
The thing we can do of course, is to actively reject PvP communities, and invest your time, effort and energy into cultivating real relationships and expertise in PPP community, vs the transient man eat boy ones in PVP spaces.
If we all eat each other vs grow each other, there’ll be nothing much to eat soon for anyone.
Crypto is probably the one industry where there’s absolutely no limit to which game you as an individual choose to play, and which communities you choose to join.
Choose PPP. Your mom will be proud.
Brainstormed more PPP notes in yesterday’s awesome planetary call:
in PPP communities, people care about each other. In PVP communities, it’s a cynical dog eat dog world.
As such, the moment hard times hit, PPP communities get stronger and PVP communities completely implode.
Solana at $8 was a great example of a community proving its PPP nature despite all odds. While the whole world wrote it off as dead, I can tell you the core ecosystem community and builders worked far harder than ever before and helped and pumped each other so much. I still miss those days, reminded me of early eth as well. Ditto for early BTC.
PPP is not just internal to the community, but external as well, helping to elevate other good projects however you can. I think Vitalik, Toly are both extremely good examples of this, and I do think this is a fundamental and vastly under appreciated reason why eth and solana won and lasted against the overwhelming odds of hate and competition.
All these PPP vs PVP talk might sound wishy washy to people who think that money, influence and power is all that matters - but all you need to do is look at the longer timeframe, and you will know what really matters.
Money, influence and power is often transient and fleeting - but friendship, brother/sisterhood, and shared ideals can last far, far longer.
PPP
PPP matters because otherwise we will eat each other up before we even get to all the fancy change the world stuff.
Right now, incentives are strongly strongly strongly geared towards PVP, that’s why we are arguably more mainstream than ever before via memecoins, but everyone feels more shitty about our industry than ever before.
We need to invent new PPP mechanisms to show that there are better alternatives than PVP.
Otherwise seriously, we will just be instadumping on each other all day, shrug our shoulders, and be like “yeh, this is just how the game is played”
I refuse to be so cynical. Let’s experiment towards a PPP future, or at least give up knowing we tried 😂😂😂
One thing that astonished me recently is how normalized PVP behaviors have become recently, and how many people have started accepting them as “business as usual”
Giving investors and marketers terms that allow them to instadump on the community, or not pushing back when these predatory terms are requested.
Promoting tokens as great holds and great communities with the intention of exiting the very next hour or day whenever convenient (lots of holders do this, not just influencers per se)
Sniping big parts of supply pre-announcement in order to pretend the circulating supply is really much higher than it really is, and of course to do massive exits
Other methods that are gaining traction includes:
Organizing opaque cabals to perform all manners of raids, from creating fake impressions of massively engaged community or massive fudding for a potential CTO
Recycling capital gained from previous tokens to perform impressions of massive fundraises, volume or liquidity
Here’s the really tricky thing - when even legit projects and participants feels like they have no choice but to play these games in order to win, then all these PvP behaviors become standardized and even accepted.
Then we end up in a situation where everyone engages in PvP, if only to defend themselves from everyone else.
When that happens, we would just end up proving skeptics right - that crypto is one big PvP game and there’s nothing here other than scams and takers.
That’s not true of course. There’s absolutely no lack of genuine players out here, me included, who deeply believe in the power of tokens, particularly memecoins as mechanisms for unifying communities and creating long lasting value.
Let’s try to create communities where PPP is the norm, not the exception. It would require everyone involved, starting w the devs, to recognize every community as a startup, which like every other startup in the planet, might not work out.
But when it works out, and sometimes it does work out - a flourishing PPP memecoin community is legitimately one of the most beautiful things in crypto - held together with nothing more than a symbol, and a common vision for a new art form in this world.