Our Goal

#MerryMerkle is on a mission to make giving into a deep and lasting tradition within the cryptocurrency community. It is not enough to pay lip service to the notion that we are changing money - we need to live that narrative so that wealth can truly be about what we share, rather than what we own. #MerryMerkle is about power with others, rather than power over them.

Bantu Steve Biko once wrote

“We believe that in the long run the special contribution to the world by Africa will be in this field of human relationship. The great powers of the world may have done wonders in giving the world a military and industrial look, but the great gift still has to come from Africa — giving the world a more human face.”

His ideas come from a long line of African humanist, communitarian philosophers. You can see it in the language Biko used: “a more human face” for the world is directly linked to the notion of “giving”. This is because gift-giving is perhaps the most profoundly human act. The gift, when given and received sincerely, is at the heart of how relationships are formed and sustained. Through building lasting relatedness, gift-giving leads to a lived sense of community in which individuals can find context, meaning, continuity and - ultimately - content.

It is this very human goal that lies at the heart of #MerryMerkle, summed up by a very African word: ubuntu, meaning “a human being is only a human being through other human beings”. In fact, this statement was written on a machine running Ubuntu, because there is no such thing as coincidence. We are all intimately connected in ways which extend beyond what the mind can imagine, and so we need - and always have needed - communal traditions to remind us of this very simple truth: we are one. One, vast soul; one matrix of pilgrims and processes on an ethical journey through time.

Put simply then, #MerryMerkle is about remembering what this was always all about. We are all Satoshi.

“And I wonder: God. Does he hear us? Does He know what our hearts are yearning for? That we all just want to be human – some with more colour, some with less, but all with air and sun. And I wade into song – in a language that is not mine, in a tongue I do not know. It is fragrant inside the song, and among the keynotes of sorrow and suffering there are soft silences where we who belong to this landscape, all of us, can come to rest.
Sometimes the times we live in overflow with light.”

Ubuntu - or the idea that we are all Satoshi - reminds us that we are not different deep down, despite our colour, or culture, or beliefs. That injustice harms equally the perpetrator and the victim. That there is no freedom other than that which is found together.

This is the gift. Or, in other words, the gift is giving. Giving of yourself, of your time, of who you are, to something greater. What exactly that “something greater” is, is defined by the people with whom you chose to relate.

Finally, gift-giving as a physical ritual quickly becomes a tradition. And traditions propagate myth across generations. If your communal myth is founded on a notion of the gift and it’s ability to create a space for “our” beyond just you and I, and you have a tradition of actual gift-giving - this forms a neat feedback loop that could help secure a slightly more equitable, slightly more human world.