cryptograss.eth

Wait, you want to associate bluegrass with crypto? Isn't crypto full of scams?

Yes, crypto is full of scams.

Let's say that again: crypto is full of scams. If someone asks you for your private key, or seed phrase / secret words, or to send them money and somehow you'll magically get more money in return, they are trying to scam you. Every time. Don't do it. If you need help interpreting a message, ask someone you trust, or hop on our discord server and ask someone with either a "crew" role or a role associating them with a bluegrass instrument.

In addition to these out-and-out scams, you'll also find a lot of undue hype, a lot of cringey shilling, and a lot of well-intentioned people who wrongly believe they can predict the future.

If someone tells you to buy something, probably don't. If they assure you it will be worth more later, remember that nobody can predict the future. Ask them to explain exactly why they believe that, where the money is coming from, and how the mechanism they are describing stands to help the world or create new opportunities and new economy that are not possible without it. Most of all, ask them who wrote the application. And if it's not them, ask why,

Uhh, OK. But why do you want to associate bluegrass with a thing that's full of scams?

Crypto is a lot like the woods. Are there fake drugs in the woods? Yes. You have to be careful. But the reason there are fake drugs - but also quality drugs - in the woods... is that there is freedom there.

You'll find scams in crypto (and please, let us help you avoid them), but you'll also find communities and deployed applications that are the freest, most interesting, most mindful, most provocative, and importantly - most coherently useful for supplanting middlemen - on the entire internet today.

And to be clear: we're not associating bluegrass with crypto - crypto-economics has always had bluegrass and other traditional music as its quintessential origin story. The realization that cryptography was useful for overcoming economic rent-seeking (exactly of the variety that we today find in the music industry) came distinctly and directly from communities (in particular, a proto-web internet community called The WELL) that were designed to, and whose principal activities were, indexing metadata of Grateful Dead tapes and tracing the traditional and bluegrass roots of the corpus of Americana.

The tradition of handing down traditional music, and allowing it to flourish and evolve in an environment of freedom, is the very tradition that has caused crypto-economics to evolve from cryptographic primitives, and this tradition is as central today to the evolution of blockchain tech as it has ever been.

Waaait a minute. You're saying that the Grateful Dead and bluegrass music are the reason we have crypto?

Yes. Without a shadow of a doubt. The evolution of internet activism, the publication of treatises like "A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace," the founding of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and the development of decentralized ideas like bittorrent and proto-blockchain protocols were all directly inspired - and often involved the same principal actors - as the music and tours of the Grateful Dead.

Some of the principals, such as Stewart Brand, who produced the first Grateful Dead shows in San Francisco, and Brewster Kahle, whose organization archive.org hosts the largest collection of Grateful Dead recordings, continue to attend ethereum events to this day as venerated elder statesmen, inspiring a new generation of blockchain developers to understand their roots in traditional psychedelic music, and its heritage and preservation.

John Perry Barlow, who wrote many GD songs that you know and probably cover, said:

"Writing songs for the Grateful Dead taught me that a jealous view of copyright was not necessarily in one’s own best interest...In a lot of ways, the band prefigured Internet culture. When I first went looking for Deadheads on Usenet, it turned out that this was a good place to find them because it was the only available agora that could then be had...Despite the many travails I encountered along the way, I would rank cofounding the Electronic Frontier Foundation as one of the major achievements of my life."

(quote is truncated, but if you read the entire section from which it is taken, I think you'll agree that it is very much in the spirit of the above.)

Captain Crunch

OK, but what about the scams?

You'll be fine. Lot scene awareness. You got this.

So there are like... hippies in crypto?

Why do you release your music for free?

What's it like being in the crypto and music worlds at the same time?

Who are some of your biggest influences in music and tech?