An Excess of Safety

There is something beautiful in raw, strange things. They do not conform to you. You must adapt to them. Crypto is still in this stage of being raw and strange, without the kind of protections from yourself or from ordinary dangers. A friend told me a story about her trip to Canada; whereas in the US, we had safety rails along the road, they did not. I found this interesting -- they treated the driver like an adult -- raw and strange. Many national parks do not have any sort of safety rails, either. If you walk along those trails, you do so at your own risk.

I think there is a real danger in making things too safe.

Let that sink in.

What dangers could arise from making things too safe?

Let's consider an example outside of crypto for a moment -- music. What happens to your favorite aggro band when they decide to sell out? You know the progression -- raw becomes polished, polished becomes popular, popular becomes insipid. Perhaps it takes them seven albums to get there, but the producer knows best. As a result, the power, the passion, the honesty, the rawness is slowly leached away, and the band, the novelist, the statesman, the preacher, all become tame, weak, insipid, and gutless.

In crypto, what happens if things are made too safe? First, you are "protected" from doing things you want or need to do. You know how this goes with software, right? First what you like becomes an option, then the option becomes hard to find, then it's only accessible via a command-line argument, then you can't do it at all -- all in the name of safety. Or in the words of Google Chrome, still in the command-line phase, "You are using an unsupported command-line flag...Stability and safety will suffer." Whether or not they will is really up to you, but Google is certain that you can't handle things yourself. Treating the users like they were infants is also part of the experience!

Laws have a way of drying up choices, because their effects ripple backwards to affect sellers, distributors, producers, and creators. Those who are into guns know this well. That's why keeping an eye on legislation is important. Some of us are approaching a kind of Calvinist position -- those illegal laws don't apply to me! However, unless you're very smart or willing to die for crypto, make sure you know what legislators are doing. We need to be at least aware if our choices are going to be made more difficult. Laws are another way of speaking protection but meaning control. Someone whose name I have forgotten once said this, "Make your vote count. Get your vote counted."

Safety is not the most important thing in life. Some of the times I have learned the most have been through mistakes or failures. If something is too safe, then my ability to learn about the thing or myself is simply never developed. I end up thinking I've learned it, but I haven't. Only later have I found out the truth an it was more painful than any gradual learning would have been.

Frontiers are not safe, yet it there where character develops. Anything new is yet raw and strange, a frontier of its own. Depriving people of what only frontiers can teach them is no kindness. It creates a world of coma patients. In other words, "An excess of safety poisons the soul."

(Photo by Sean Benesh on Unsplash).