It is entirely possible that I have taken the wrong approach when it comes to being part of the Cryptosphere: For all this time, I have been trying to get it to make sense to me.
Maybe this is a "weakness," when your background is legacy finance and investing.
You look for things like business plans and revenue sources and whether or not a project/idea will have the sort of staying power that will result in long-term viability.
In (a large part of) crypto, such thinking seems to be largely optional, as long as you have a really good and hyped up story, and you can persuade people to throw money at you in the immediate term.
When I first got involved in crypto — more than a decade ago — the idea that someone's token/blockchain was the actual "product" being sold was less common than it seems today. The blockchain was the "vehicle" and the token was the "fuel" to get things going.
In conventional finance (for example) you transact in dollars, doing whatever it is you do. You create a product, using those dollars. The dollars, themselves, aren't the product.
Sometimes, I can't help but think that crypto — as it exists today — is primarily a massive waste of time, as well as a money pit similar to those "multi-level marketing" schemes of the 1980's and 1990's that pretty much had no product at all, just a bunch of empty promises that kept everyne hopeful while at the same time emptying most people's pockets.
But they were always able to point to "User such-and-such is making $20,000 a month, using our plan!" and the claims were 100% honest and legitimate, in the sense that maybe a dozen people out of the programs hundreds of thousands of users authentically were making $20,000 a month... while everyone else kept trying, while handing over a $50 a month subscriber fee that never returned anything.
I remember ebing suckered into one of those gigs, and after 18 months of working my butt off I was managing to get occasional $500 monthly checks.
Which basically worked out to be somewhat less than 25% of minimum wage...
This year, I have gradually been de-coupling from quite a few of the crypto initiatives I have been following... many of them based in Hive's own 2nd layer.
While I won't go as far as to suggest that I have been lied to, I will say that I have ended up feeling invariably disappointed by the fact that virtually everything seems to have its basis in wishful thinking, rather than even the most tenuous grip on reality.
In some ways, even Hive is a little disappointing... although I have no complaints about the social blogging aspects of what we do here. It still beats the snot our of Farcebook and most of the other mainstream social media venues.
And I have to admit that it is fun to occasionally earn a little bit of crypto for our efforts!
Thanks for coming to visit!