I once had a pastor tell me that "Ministry would be easy if it weren't for all the people." This is one of those little inside jokes that's trotted out at pastors conferences to a small, knowing chuckle. It’s a saying that sounds right on the surface. Perhaps it feels like a quick way to find solidarity in a shared frustration. But the longer you think about it, the worse it gets. The sentiment begins to curdle. I've gotten to the point where whenever I hear it, I want to stand up and reply, "But without the people, there is NO MINISTRY!"

Sure, dealing with people and all that baggage that we all carry around with us everywhere is challenging. It’s messy. It's unpredictable, and it's often thankless. But, at least in my mind, the primary role of a pastor is to serve people. The entire endeavor is predicated on human connection. It's based on helping people grow, and building a healthy community. If you don't want to work with people, with all their beautiful and frustrating complexities, then the entire enterprise is pointless. In fact for years, I used to think if you truly wanted to escape the messiness of human interaction, you should go get a job in tech. Build systems. Write code. Create elegant, logical structures that operate on pure, unfeeling reason. Don't like people? Go work with computers I thought.

Until this past week.

I had the opportunity to attend my very first Rare Evo, a blockchain-specific conference historically tied to the Cardano ecosystem. The air was electric! (As an aside only true outsiders could think this is a ghost chain) The conference was filled with the buzz of innovation and the shared vision of a decentralized future. Conversations flowed freely, dense with technical jargon and the latest developments in smart contracts, scalability, cross-chain interoperability, sero-knowledge (ZK) proofs, and much more. On the surface, it was the epitome of a tech-centric world, a sanctuary of systems and logic.

But as I listened, I was reminded of that old saying from the pastor that people are the problem on the way to progress. Now this was never explicitly stated, but even mentioned. At least not on the surface. But I sensed it as I listened closely, to the presentations on stage AND to the conversations in the hallways, the discussions around the dinner tables, and the passionate debates after hours. In between the tech talk, the same sentiment kept bubbling up to the surface, quite clearly: blockchain would be easy if it weren't for all the people.

I was not prepared. I think the irony is staggering. We are building systems designed to be "trustless," yet the entire ecosystem runs on the deeply personal trust, or lack thereof, between human beings. We are creating decentralized networks to eliminate single points of failure, yet the most catastrophic failures often stem from a single person's ego or a small group's fallout. Every technical challenge I heard discussed was, at its root, a human challenge. The code, it turns out, is the easy part. Humans are the blockchain's real, unconquered frontier.

The Human Failure Points

In the traditional corporate world, there are clear hierarchies and power structures. If there's a disagreement, the boss makes a decision. If someone is not performing, they are managed out by HR. It can be cold and impersonal, but it's a known quantity, a common system. In the decentralized world of blockchain, these structures are intentionally dismantled. What replaces them? A sprawling, chaotic, and intensely human web of relationships.

I heard stories, veiled in anonymity, of certain projects floundering due to mismanagement and unscrupulous leadership. Despite the collective passion to accomplish the project's goal, it was effectively dead on arrival simply due to bad judgement by the project's leader. I heard about brilliant individuals being effectively pushed out of significant roles in important projects, not by the will of the community, but by the political maneuvering of other individuals. Even in some Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAO), where governance is meant to be distributed, strong personalities can still command immense influence. They bend the project's direction through charisma and force of will, often clashing with other strong personalities in a struggle for dominance. What was striking is that these aren't technical bugs in a smart contract! These are features of the human condition playing out on a new, global and digital stage.

Every project has a vision, a grand idea for how it will change the world, or at least a small corner of it. But there is an immense hesitancy to adopt a vision when it must be embraced not by a handful of executives, but by thousands of disparate, anonymous, and autonomous individuals. A leader can't simply issue a memo and expect results. They must persuade, cajole, debate, and inspire a global community that is under no obligation to listen.

This is made infinitely more complex by the sheer diversity of participants. Every debate is a collision of differing opinions and unique perspectives. These aren't just minor disagreements over the color of a button; they are fundamental clashes of ideology about the very purpose of the network. Is the goal pure decentralization, or fairness, or TVL? Or is user experience paramount, even if it requires some centralized shortcuts? These aren't questions that code can answer. They are philosophical, and they are fought with a fervor that can make corporate politics look tame.

Adding another layer of complexity are the very real barriers of differing languages and cultures. A project’s community might span dozens of countries. A statement that is considered direct and efficient in German culture might be seen as rude and abrasive in Japanese culture. Communication, the absolute bedrock of collaboration, becomes a minefield of potential misunderstandings. The nuances of tone, context, and intent are easily lost across translation apps and Discord channels, leading to friction and mistrust that has nothing to do with the technology itself.

The Predictable Unpredictability of Us

This brings me to the core tension. At a macro level, humans are incredibly complex, despite their motivations seeming deceptively simple. Spend any amount of time in the crypto space, and you’ll become intimately familiar with the base drivers of the market: fear and greed. The acronyms FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out) and FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt) aren't just slang; they are the fundamental emotional levers that move billions of dollars.

In that sense, why people respond to certain situations is relatively easy to figure out. If a token's price is skyrocketing, people will feel fear and want to buy in. If a prominent figure tweets something negative about a project, people will feel fear again and be tempted to sell. We can model this with game theory. We can predict that in a given system, a certain percentage of people will act in their own rational self-interest.

But here is the critical distinction: while we can often predict why people will act, it is nearly impossible to predict how they will act. How we respond to any given situation is based on any number of complex variables. Heck, even I can respond to the same situation in a whole variety of ways all based on how I slept last night! How individuals will respond in a specific context is nearly unknowable.

Greed might motivate a person to try and accumulate more tokens. But how do they do it? Do they contribute positively to the ecosystem to earn rewards? Do they create helpful content to build a following? Or do they orchestrate a sophisticated social engineering attack, spread disinformation to manipulate prices, or exploit a loophole in a governance proposal to enrich themselves at the community's expense? The "why" is simple greed. The "how" is a canvas for infinite, and sometimes terrifying, human creativity. The same is true for fear, for ego, for altruism, for every human driver. The method of expression is endlessly variable, and it is in this variability that the true complexity lies.

Old Problems, Immutable Consequences

This leads to the most fascinating and frightening aspect of the human problem in blockchain. There will always be people who disagree and think things should be done differently. That's not new. There are always going to be those who try to game the system for their own personal profit. Again, not new, that’s as old as currency itself. These are not new problems, nor are they unique to decentralized networks.

What makes these age-old human problems so profoundly interesting, and dangerous, however, is that their consequences are amplified by the core tenets of the technology itself: immutability and decentralization, or the absence of a central intermediary.

Outside web3, we typically have safety nets built around human fallibility. If you get scammed, you can call your credit card company and request a chargeback. If a contract is broken, you can take the other party to court. If a bank teller makes a mistake, the transaction can be reversed. These systems exist precisely because we know people are messy and imperfect. They are institutionalized "do-overs."

Blockchain, by its very design, seeks to eliminate many of these intermediaries and their do-overs. The mantra is "Code is Law." A transaction, once confirmed on the ledger, is permanent and irreversible. A smart contract, once deployed, will execute exactly as written, without regard for the intent of its creators. This was highlighted for me in a governance workshop where we were reminded that losing your signing keys was a public, and permanent embarrassment.

This creates a mind-blowing but terrifying new paradigm from a purely human perspective. When someone successfully games this system, there is often no recourse. When a hacker exploits a vulnerability and drains a mistyped contract, or buggy protocol of millions of dollars, there is no cosmic bank to appeal to. The funds are gone, immutably transferred. When a faction successfully executes a hostile governance takeover of a DAO, their control is cryptographically secured. The system worked exactly as it was designed. It was the human intent behind the usage that was malicious. The "people problem" moves from a correctable error to a permanent, unchangeable fact etched into the digital stone of the ledger.

Let me be more specific. In this new era of governance on Cardano, there seems to be a general desire for a plurality of DReps. But that's not automatically built into the system. As a natural outcome of the one ada, one vote rule you'd expect there to be a large number of DReps. But, what if everyone just decided to delegate their stake to a single rep, is that a flaw? Has the system failed in some meaningful way? The truth is that no, it has not. The tech doesn't care how many or few DReps there are. The system doesn't care, but do we? Because the tech in Cardano is amazing! The room is filled with the smartest people in blockchain. It's why I'm part of this system rather than the thousands of other options popping up everyday. I believe it's why we're all here. But the problem this raises isn't a technical challenge, it's a human one.

We Must Lean Into the Struggle

So what is the solution? The technocrat’s answer is to try and code our way out of the problem. To create more perfect governance systems, more complex economic incentives, more rigid smart contracts that account for every conceivable human action. To build a system so logically perfect that it transcends the messiness of its creators.

But this is a fool’s errand. It is an attempt to solve a human problem with a technical solution, and it will always fall short. You cannot code away ego. You cannot write a smart contract that eliminates cultural misunderstanding. You cannot design an algorithm that can prevent betrayal.

The real path forward, the one I saw glimmers of hope for at Rare Evo, is to do the opposite. Instead of trying to engineer humanity out of the system, we need to lean into the struggle. In my career I've seen how those who go out of their way to avoid tension tend to create more of it. While those who acknowledge the complexities of human interaction and press toward the tension tend to resolve it. I believe this ecosystem needs to embrace that the tension and the struggle are not bugs, but features. Disagreement is not a sign of failure; it's the immune system of a decentralized network at work, stress-testing ideas and forging consensus through debate.

This means building systems not to replace human interaction, but to facilitate healthier versions of it. It means creating clearer frameworks for communication and fostering a Cardano culture that values robust AND respectful debate. It means building social layers such as reputation systems, dispute resolution mechanisms, and community moderation. These must exist alongside immutable code. The future of blockchain isn't just about better cryptography; it's about better social psychology.

In the end, I came back to my initial realization about ministry. Without the people, there is no ministry; it’s just an empty building with a guy standing by himself talking about an old book. In the same way, without the people, there is no blockchain; it’s just a cryptographically secured protocol devoid of meaningful transactions.

To be transparent now, I am here FOR the passion, the arguments, the tribalism, the brilliant collaboration, the devastating fallouts, and the unshakeable belief in a different, better future, for all humanity. These are the things that give the technology its purpose and its value. The greatest challenge in building the decentralized future is not scaling transactions per second. It is scaling human trust, empathy, and cooperation. Blockchain would be easy if it weren't for all the people, but without the people, it would be utterly pointless. And solving that human equation is the only "killer app" that will ever truly matter.