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The Hardest Skill in Crypto

Everything covered in the previous courses in this series has been about what crypto is: how blockchains work, how markets function, what DeFi does, how to think about investing. This course is about something different. It is about how you think, and specifically about the forces that make thinking clearly about crypto harder than it should be.

Crypto is an environment unusually well-designed to distort clear thinking. It is young, which means uncertainty is high and confident-sounding predictions are easy to make without accountability. It is financially significant, which means the incentives to say particular things rather than true things are strong. It is technically complex, which means most participants cannot fully verify what they are told and must decide how much trust to extend to sources they cannot completely evaluate. And it is emotionally engaging, which means the ordinary mechanisms that help people think carefully, scepticism, patience, and a willingness to be wrong, are regularly overridden by excitement, fear, or tribal loyalty.

This course does not tell you what to think about crypto. It examines the conditions that make thinking clearly about it difficult, and offers tools for navigating those conditions with more awareness than you would otherwise have.

A Note on What This Course Is Not

This course is not an argument that crypto is good or bad, likely to succeed or fail, worth engaging with or worth avoiding. Those are conclusions that depend on facts, values, and circumstances specific to each person, and this course deliberately does not supply them. What it does is try to make sure that whatever conclusions you reach are the result of your own clear thinking rather than the result of someone else's agenda, your own brain's shortcuts, or an information environment that was not designed with your interests in mind.

What You Will Learn

Chapter 1: Common Cognitive Biases

The biases most specific to how people think about crypto as a technology

and a movement, building on the investing biases covered earlier.

Chapter 2:  Incentives and Power Structures

How power concentrates in supposedly decentralised systems, and why the

people most loudly promoting decentralisation often benefit most from it.

Chapter 3: Misinformation and Influence

How false and misleading information spreads in crypto, who creates it,

and what makes it so difficult to identify and resist.

Chapter 4: Separating Belief from Evidence

The difference between having a view about crypto and having evidence for

it, and why that distinction is harder to maintain than it sounds.

Chapter 5: Long-Term Uncertainty

What honest thinking about crypto's future actually looks like, and a

practical framework for making decisions under genuine uncertainty.