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Yes, this exactly. Billion dollar companies contribute to open source because the model is a net economic driver. I can tap into decades long and billions of dollars of man hours of effort to offer systems admin consultation and earn a living deploying and managing open source software for people, or incorporate that into almost any business, or participate in hackathons that riff on the bleeding edge of ai or security or art. The only barrier to entry is ability and willingness to learn, and things like moocs and YouTube and Khan Academy have expanded the "open source" ethos into almost every real world endeavor.

Crypto is a nascent space that similarly enables people to bypass all the gatekeeping and institutional cruft in finance. It just turns out that a lot of the gatekeeping in finance is structurally important and intentional, so it may be a couple decades before any particular cryptocurrency is comparably robust and secure as well trusted fiat currencies like the usd or euro. A trustless and mature financial system that doesn't have the pitfalls of credit bureaus and arbitrary government policy chaos, that opens up microloans and honest banking for literally anyone, that gives opportunity to invest and trade and participate even at low levels of wealth - those are socially good things, in my view.



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