Web3 and Faith: Technology Serving Truth

People who know I'm a Christian ask: how does someone with your values work in crypto? The implication is that crypto is inherently speculative, deceptive, or oriented around greed. Some of it is. So is some of every industry.

The question I ask is whether the specific things I'm building serve truth, create genuine value, and enable people to make better decisions. By those standards, what I'm doing passes. By those same standards, a lot of other things in the industry don't.

The core value proposition of blockchain technology is trustlessness — you don't have to trust a person or institution, just code. Smart contracts execute as written. The ledger doesn't lie. Nobody can change it retroactively.

As a Christian who believes in the importance of honesty and who has seen people in positions of trust abuse it, trustless systems have real appeal. The 2008 financial crisis was fundamentally a trust failure — institutions people relied on behaved dishonestly and caused catastrophic harm. Systems that don't require trust remove that failure mode.

Prediction markets enforce epistemic honesty in a way nothing else does. You can say whatever you want publicly — that your preferred candidate will win in a landslide, that the economy is great — but betting against your stated belief costs you money. The market is a lie detector with financial consequences.

From a Christian perspective on truth-telling, this is genuinely interesting. We've built an institution that makes lying about probabilities expensive. That's not nothing.

I don't build products designed to maximize user engagement at the cost of user wellbeing. I don't optimize for addictive patterns. I don't hide fees or obfuscate how the product works. PolyFire is 1% flat — explicit, simple, honest.

I also won't build certain products: anonymous influence operations, tools designed to deceive, anything that's fundamentally extractive from users who don't understand what they're getting into. Not because these are illegal — some are legal — but because they're wrong.

Is building a trading product an endorsement of greed? I don't think so. Markets are mechanisms for information aggregation and resource allocation. Trading is how information becomes price. Profiting from correct analysis is not greed — it's the reward signal that makes the system work.

Greed is wanting more than you need at others' expense. Trading well — finding real information advantages and acting on them honestly — is not that. The distinction matters.

I don't think better technology makes people more moral. Blockchain doesn't eliminate dishonesty — people find new ways to cheat in every system. AI doesn't improve judgment — it amplifies whatever judgment the user has, good or bad.

Technology is a tool. It can serve truth or serve lies, serve users or exploit them, create value or extract it. The directional choice is a human one. My job is to make that choice well in the products I build. The technology is indifferent.