About
CJ Carswell
Behavioral scientist, author, and founder of BlocPsych, LLC. I study why people adopt, misuse, and abandon decentralized systems — and what that implies for how those systems ought to be built.
I came to this work from the wrong direction. I bought Bitcoin on a friend's advice, was hurt by it, was scammed by it, and never stopped believing in what it was designed to do. That combination is unusual enough to be useful: most people who are harmed by this industry leave, and most people who stay were never harmed.
What I found when I started looking properly is that the well-documented failures of the past decade were rarely engineering failures. They were governance failures, disclosure failures, and decision failures. Those are human categories, and they respond to human remedies.
The theory
The Theory of Blockchain Psychology rests on a distinction that is well established in the decision sciences. Fast Adaptive Thinking — the intuitive, pattern-matching mode described as System 1 — carries almost all of ordinary life and is very good at what it does. Deliberative Thinking, System 2, is slow and effortful, and it is the only mode suited to decisions that cannot be reversed. Daniel Kahneman's synthesis of that research remains the clearest account of the division (Thinking, Fast and Slow).
Blockchain systems require the second mode and are almost always used in the first. Everything else in this body of work — the Fortune 500 findings, the governance framework, the diagnostics — is an attempt to take that mismatch seriously and do something practical about it.
The work
- Research — the Fortune 500 report, the BE DAO white paper, the books
- Insights — ongoing written analysis
- Watch — video essays and conversations, each with a written continuation
- Services — behavioral diagnostics for protocols, DAOs, and institutions
How I work
I prefer writing to speaking, and asynchronous thought partnership to meetings. If you want to work together, the most useful first step is a written note about what is actually going wrong — not a calendar invitation. I read everything that arrives.
I am a student of Carl Jung, and the through-line of all of it is wholeness: systems that account for the entire person rather than the idealised rational actor who appears in economic models and nowhere else.
BlocPsych, LLC is registered in Sheridan, Wyoming. Elsewhere: LinkedIn, YouTube, The BlocPsych Brief.