I’m not new to the blockchain space. I’ve held cryptocurrencies since 2013, been an occasional miner since 2014 when you could earn XRP by contributing to Berkeley’s grid computing project, and an entrepreneur working with blockchain technology since 2015.

During these last 5 years, I’ve watch the space grow and evolve from a rather obscure corner of technology and anarcho-economics to the center of an emerging movement towards decentralization and the remaking of trust. Bitcoin rose from around $200 to a peak of more than $20,000, Ethereum was conceived and launched, and hundreds if not thousands of teams with ICOs have jumped into the fray. However, for all of this, there’s one thing that I’ve found to be unfortunately consistent. And that’s the tendency of those of us in this space to isolate ourselves.

In a lot of ways this makes sense. It’s honestly exhausting to constantly explain the basics of blockchain technology and its merits to “outsiders”; it’s comforting to be a room where everyone agrees that cryptocurrencies are going to the moon, and all we need to decide which moon they’re likely to land on, ours or Saturn’s; and since many of us have grown emotionally attached to the change we believe blockchain can affect in the world, it’s scary and upsetting to have that view challenged. For all of these reasons, and likely more, you can now find longtime adherents to this doctrine at highly-focused conferences, workshops, and meetup groups nearly anywhere in the world.

Now none of this is to say that the blockchain community isn’t welcoming to newcomers, after all, what religion doesn’t want to grow its numbers. But acceptance does nothing to alleviate the crucial problem that has been in the blockchain space for at least as long as I have.

Our willingness to welcome those who have already convinced themselves in private of blockchain’s merit, does nothing to make our space into what it needs to be: firmly rooted in the problems of the world, moderately skeptical of itself, and in close dialogue with other emerging (and even some forgotten) technologies and economic schools of thought.

I believe that it is important for the blockchain community to become more integrated with the outside world exactly because I am personally so invested in the promise of the space and believe that willful and active openness and engagement is the only way for us to thrive. And as I’m confident most sociologists would agree, cultural and intellectual groups that isolate themselves nearly always become increasingly radicalized and dogmatic and eventually find themselves unable to effect the change or progress that precipitated their very existence.