It's harder to build something useful than to speculate on tokens. Speculation often involves being smarter than the next guy. Building means you have to go up against the laws of physics, nature, human motivational psychology, economics, technology, philosophy, and more.

This creates an existential problem: Why do smart people build when they can instead extract value via speculation (using, ironically, things other people built)?

One answer is moral belief: They think what they are building matters to the world more than money.

If they are right, and what they are building helps enough people, the money should eventually come, but it's a long (and often expensive) game.

Shout out to the builders who don't care about the risk or game theory and build anyway because of what they believe.

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<sub>I realized lately I've been posting more on <a href="https://www.facebook.com/bestoked/">Facebook</a>, <a href="https://twitter.com/lukestokes">Twitter</a>, and even <a href="https://app.voice.com/profile/lukestokes">Voice</a> than here. I'm going to change that by cross posting a bit, just to get writing on Hive again. Normally I use my @lukes.random account for random social media posts, but meh. Who cares. This is my blog, so this is where I'll post whatever.</sub>