Is $PAYPR Better?

That’s the question of not only our generation, but the ages.

Paper currency initially justified its existence as a more convenient store of value than the original alternatives — like, say, a 27-pound Good Delivery bar of gold. Flash forward to now, as paper faces its own more convenient challenger. The Digital Age hasn’t just raised questions about the usefulness of paper currency, but of paper period. While cryptocurrency is slowly but steadily encroaching on the greenback’s popularity, digital products have largely usurped paper everywhere else, from media to information archives.

I’m sure the topics and tenor of our newsletter make it obvious which side of this divide we come down on. But that doesn’t mean we don’t understand the nuanced benefits — and drawbacks — of both. Indeed, today, the fragility of the digital ecosystem was put on full blast.

Microsoft-based operating systems across the corporate world are Blue Screen of Death-ing. Is it a cyberattack? I’m sure the security team behind all of these trusty Microsoft business OS devices will tell us the truth in a timely manner. At this point in time, word on the street is the Microsoft team just needs to take some more Summer Fridays. (In other words, a buggy update, pushed out too fast.)

Unfortunately for all the people relying on those systems, it probably means the weekend will have to wait as well, as bank accounts, flight systems, and many others across the globe were still down at the time of writing. Oh, the irony.

Increasingly, we are exposed to wave after wave of cybersecurity issues crippling critical public infrastructure. Because they are managed by private companies in the free market, we rarely view them as public infrastructure, but our universal reliance on these systems says otherwise. Back when the world ran on paper, a power outage wouldn’t translate to a crippling blow worldwide.

We’ll be the first to admit, adoption of inherently digital web3 technologies doesn’t eliminate these security risks. In fact, it probably accelerates and increases the reach of their impact.

Composability, a blockchain buzzword referring to computer systems with components that can be easily rearranged in different combinations depending on the user’s needs, entails digital interconnectedness in a way we haven’t experienced before. This opens up individuals and the wider culture to a range of security risks.

Most of those risks are on an individual level. Scammers socially engineering people into giving up passwords remains one of the largest threats, and that’ll never change. So there’s a reason I have my crypto wallet seed phrase stored not in a (heavily surveilled) Google doc, but on a piece of scrap paper.

I do stand for the efficiency and convenience of a digital ecosystem. But above that, I stand for balance, and the events of this week suggest to me that we should probably use it to build some functional paper backup systems to survive any real outage event.

Information is power. Power shouldn’t be our only way of accessing it.

—El Prof