The Value of Values
Three Things #163: March 30, 2025
I’ve always been extremely values-driven, more than most of my friends. I’m proud of this, but I also recognize that it has downsides. I was reflecting on this recently after listening to a very interesting podcast interview on the topic. In fact, I wrote about the topic recently, but specifically in the context of blockchain economics. I realized that there’s a broader question here about values, and of purity and idealism vs. pragmatism. Should we insist on always putting values first, or should we instead do what we need to in order to get the job done?
Thing #1: Values 💎
While my values have evolved over time, my core values haven’t. These include curiosity, excellence, inclusiveness, privacy, truth, and equality of opportunity. These core values have shaped my life and the trajectory of my career. They’re the reason I decided to leave the finance industry, go back to school, and become an entrepreneur. They’re a big part of the reason I chose to work in the blockchain industry, and to stay in the industry despite all of the ups and downs. They’re also a big part of the reason I care so deeply about things like open source, open data, privacy, and user-owned Internet.
I’m proud of remaining true to these values, but there’s a cost associated with these values, as there is with all values. The biggest costs for me have been economic and reputational. On the economic side, if my goal were to make as much money as possible, values be damned, I would’ve been better off staying in the traditional finance industry. Or, having been in the blockchain and cryptocurrency space for a while, I should’ve (and could’ve) launched a bunch of worthless tokens and dumped them on retail investors, like so many of my peers.
On the reputational side, I’ve always cared more about telling the truth and doing the right thing than about making other people happy. I’ve seen time and time again how hard this is, and how it causes you to make enemies. The most obvious example is when I was fired from the Ethereum Foundation and cancelled from the Ethereum community in 2019 for refusing to toe the party line, insisting that, e.g., the transition to proof of stake was a mistake, and for calling out bad behavior that I saw on the part of influential people. I don’t regret that decision one bit, but it’s a clear price I paid for putting truth over pragmatism or likability.
That’s okay with me. I can’t put my finger on precisely why my values are so important to me, but they are. My values are more important than just about anything else. Maybe I just have an overactive conscience. They’re such a core part of my identity, I wouldn’t be me without them. It’s always been this way, and I’m just not interested in compromising my values for personal gain: As the Bible puts it so well, “For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?”
To me a thing isn’t worth doing if it isn’t done the right way, and I’m not interested in doing things that aren’t aligned with my values. This might mean making less money, and it might mean being less popular, but it’s just the right thing to do. I’m fortunate enough to be able to choose what to work on, who to work with, and how to spend my time, and I choose to work on values-aligned projects with values-aligned people: the sort of things that make the world a better place. This also means saying no to lots of enticing opportunities, but I’ve made my peace with this, too. I sleep well at night.
Thing #2: Pragmatism 📌
Remaining true to your values is hard and it comes at a cost. The reality is that most people aren’t especially values-driven. Marc Andreessen put it well when he said in a recent podcast interview that most people don’t actually have core beliefs. Rather, we’re “oversocialized’” which simply means that we tend to go along with the crowd even when we shouldn’t.
We first and foremost identify with a group or tribe. Then, we align ourselves with the sentiment of that crowd, even when those positions change over time. What’s more, we often don’t even recognize or acknowledge that our position has changed over time. If asked, we’ll suggest that our “beliefs”, such as they are, were always consistent. (This reminds me of Nineteen Eighty-four’s political geography—“Oceania has always been at war with Eurasia!”—and of memory holes.)
The alternative to being values-driven is, therefore, to be social and pragmatic. To be social means to outsource your thoughts and beliefs, to sublimate them to one’s tribe or social group. Values are inputs, not outputs: they’re where you start, not where you end up. By contrast pragmatism focuses on outputs and outcomes.
The clear upside of being social is that you’ll have many friends and few enemies, at least among your own tribe. By contrast, if you’re values driven, even if your values initially align with those of the tribe, over time as the tribe’s values shift you’ll find yourself more and more out of line with the group, and by extension less and less popular. And if your values like mine tend to include important but dangerous things like truth, authenticity, and integrity, you’ll face inevitable conflict when members of the group behave in untruthful or inauthentic ways. You’ll be forced to choose between the tribe and your values, which is one of the hardest choices that a person can make.
And the upside of being pragmatic is simply that you’re more likely to succeed. Over the very long term, remaining true to your values probably correlates in some way to success or longevity, if for no other reason than that internal consistency reduces the mental stress associated with cognitive dissonance. And there’s something to be said for reputation as well, for being known as someone who has a clear set of values and remains true to them over time, at least in some circles. But these effects diminish at shorter time scales. The definition of pragmatism is doing what’s most likely to succeed, especially over the short term. So, by definition, the pragmatic are going to outperform the values-driven at all but the very longest time scale.
Of course, like all choices, these also have downsides. The downside to being social is that you outsource and subjugate critical parts of your identity to the tribe, which means giving up agency and identity. In my experience and opinion, this is a recipe for unhappiness: those who don’t know themselves and don’t feel in the driver’s seat of their own lives are going to struggle in life.
The downside to pragmatism is that you may succeed, but you’re also likely to succeed for the wrong reasons. The true pragmatist doesn’t shy away from lying, stealing, taking advantage of other people, or profiting from a hurtful enterprise in the name of expediency. This has a “moral cost,” whether in terms of actual trouble—some of the people you took advantage of may seek revenge—or the simple anxiety and mental stress associated with having a guilty conscience and being worried about this sort of retribution.
Choosing one’s values carefully, and remaining true to them, might be the longer, slower, high road to success, but it’s absolutely the one I chose, and continue to choose every day. Internal consistency matters, too, and for this reason too I sleep well at night.
Thing #3: Opportunity, Danger 🚨
I want to conclude with a concrete case study. Spacemesh is the most values-driven project I’ve ever been a part of (and that’s saying something, as I’ve worked on a number of nonprofits and open source projects). Everything about the project, from conception through to design, execution, marketing, communication, etc., was all based on a consistent set of values including curiosity, compassion, patience, integrity, and authenticity. The project is dedicated to the proposition that anyone, anywhere can participate in a global blockchain network not only as a user but indeed as a miner, i.e., as an independent full peer, without intermediation. In this sense, Spacemesh is also about participation and democratization of access to opportunities for value creation and exchange. While the team and the project faced myriad challenges over time in designing, launching, and operating the network, we never compromised on those values, something that I’m extraordinarily proud of.
Another of Spacemesh’s founding propositions is that there’s an opportunity to build a blockchain that’s novel not only in its choice of technology and design, but indeed in the sense that it stands for something more—something more than that technology and something more than hype and “number go up.” In this way, Spacemesh is truly unique among its peers. It turned out that there’s no shortage of people in our ecosystem and industry who were excited by this mission, and who were excited to be part of a project like Spacemesh. In an industry dominated by projects focused on the short term, on pragmatism, and on hype above all, Spacemesh really stands as an exemplar that it’s possible to do things in a very different way. Again, this is something I’m extraordinarily proud of.
And yet, Spacemesh has struggled. It’s struggled to stand out in an increasingly crowded space. It’s struggled to attract attention, capital, and talent. It’s struggled to attract and retain users and active community members, when other projects that raised 10x as much money are doing airdrops, hiring KOLs to make lots of noise, throwing big events, doing roadshows, and bribing teams to build. Spacemesh made the decision to lead with values and with code rather than with hype and noise. But values aren’t sexy and code takes time, and people have short attention spans. Crypto people have exceptionally short attention spans.
In other words, Spacemesh has struggled because it chose to remain true to its values. In a way, I see now that this was a naive decision. Spacemesh is inspired by and modeled after Bitcoin. Bitcoin succeeded without aidrops, KOLs, or bribes, but Bitcoin and Spacemesh were launched at very different times and in very different worlds. One of the lessons I’ve taken from my experience at Spacemesh is that projects that are truly purist about values are at an inherent disadvantage to projects that are willing to be more pragmatic. It’s the same struggle that’s playing out between Ethereum, which has always been purist and unwilling to compromise on things like decentralization and censorship resistance, vs. Solana, which is far more practical and focused on shipping usable infrastructure and apps above all.
Remaining true to one’s values feels good, but it’s dangerous for all of the reasons just described. As much as I wish it were otherwise, the reality is that the vast majority of people simply don’t have strong beliefs. They have their present circumstances, which most are unable to escape. They have fears, needs, and desires. And they have their social context, as discussed above: they tend to go along with the crowd, even when they shouldn’t, sometimes without even realizing it. With vanishingly few exceptions, the projects—blockchain or otherwise—that are the most successful are the ones that understand and exploit this reality. They do this by being ruthlessly pragmatic, by cutting corners and leaning into expediency. They do this through airdrops, relentless shilling, KOLs, bribing exchanges and builders, manipulating markets, etc.—all things that I find extraordinarily distasteful. But I can’t say that they don’t work.
This is one of my most important lessons as a builder, and as an entrepreneur: being purist is beyond difficult. Being an entrepreneur means making many sacrifices. Are you willing to sacrifice your values in order to succeed? If not, are you willing to pay the price of being values-driven?