We're starting to enter the dark ages of crypto. It's not too late yet, but it is going to be. WATCH OUT.
From Wikipedia:
The [black] plague created a series of religious, social, and economic upheavals, which had profound effects on the course of European history.
From 
:
The birth of cryptocurrency and blockchain technology created a series of political, social, and economic upheavals where greed has profound effects on the course of alienating mainstream adoption.
STOP FOR A MINUTE. PAUSE. READ THIS, AND THINK.
First, let me tell you the good news, because there is a LOT of good news. New, fascinating decentralized blockchain projects are emerging every day. The best of the best get the greatest traction and are the most well known.
Competition is always good. It drives innovation, research, development, and speeds the launching of new tools so the public can benefit from them sooner.
If we had true trustless, provingly fair financial systems, that allowed the banked and unbanked to participate, the world economic system wouldn't be in a state of turmoil that it is today.
If cryptocurrency and blockchain technology was a train, it is speeding down the line with an unchartered destination. You can either get on the train, or watch it whiz by...
...but what if that train was going too fast to make the next turn? What if it was about to derail itself?
Here's the bad news.
One thing Satoshi Nakamoto underestimated was greed. We underestimate it too. Let's correct our mistake.
Bitcoin was released as an experiment, open source, for these reasons:
a) The code could be audited by anyone. There was nothing to hide
b) People who wanted to contribute its development could, and those developments if worthy and decided by consensus would make it into the core code.
c) The coin was forkable, to allow other related projects to compete with Bitcoin
Of course Satoshi Nakamoto knew that greed was a significant factor, but the blockchain and consensus could handle it; in fact it thrives on it.
With one single exception.
We're clouding the space with our greed by creating new tokens. Go look at coinmarketcap.com, we have tokens coming out like they are going out of style.
LET'S BACK UP FOR A MINUTE.
From Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Token_coin
The key point of difference between a token and a coin is that a coin is issued by a governmental local or national authority and is freely exchangeable for goods or other coins, whereas a token has a much more limited use and is often (but not always) issued by a private company, group, association or individual.
BLOCKCHAIN TECHNOLOGY IS FULL OF ODDBALL TOKENS
Well they can be exchanged. Some tokens are worth more than other tokens.
Why?
Let's get to REAL REASON why...
From a developer's aspect, it is much easier to create your own token for these reasons:
1. You don't have to buy any existing token. Create your own, they're free.
2. You can decide how many you get, or you can mine them yourself early before anyone even knows what you're about to build. Put up an announce thread, hint at what it is, before too many people realize it and words travel, release the chain FAST and mine away.
3. As the creator and developer of the token, you become the government of that token. (Yes, I know all about delegates, witnesses, consensus). But at some point, you are the initial government who starts the roadmap.
Now let us look at it from a user's aspect.
1. Did a new token have to be created? Probably not. This same technology that powers this new tool or application could have made use of existing tokens that I already own.
2. So I either buy this new token by investing more of my money, or I sell off some of my other tokens and then trade them for this token?
3. So now, I have to add this token to my growing list of other tokens?
4. Now I must buy, sell, trade, and predict values of all these other tokens? I don't want to be a daytrader while I make use of these blockchain technologies. Keeping track of my holdings in so many tokens is too confusing.
DO YOU SEE WHERE THIS IS GOING YET?
Let me lay it out really, really, simple.
Developers will argue until the sun goes down, each and every day, that they can't possibly make use of a standardized token, because another blockchain may cease to exist that created that token.
Developers will say that our project doesn't control that other project, nor do we have any developmental control of that other project.
Regular users don't care. They are the ones we must appease.
SO DEVELOPERS ARE MAINSTREAM ADOPTION
OVER HERE AND REGULAR USERS ARE OVER HERE
The great wall of China separates them both.
So what do we have today?
The dark ages of crypto. The dead-cart drivers are walking down the streets, ringing their bells, and yelling "bring out your dead".
That's right... developers who have abandoned their projects. Pump and dump scams. ICO's that never really go anywhere in the long term.
It's like a bubonic plague.. Let's just keep creating new tokens until we drown in them.
This ends only one of two ways:
1. Either we correct our mistake, and find a way to have cross-platform solutions that use the same token
OR
2. Centralized banks with centralized governments will do it for you, and you will not like the implementations, regulations, or prohibitions.
Did you know there are approx 180 recognized circulating currencies in the world? But the majority of them are geographically based?
This is the internet that we're on right now.. and we're not geographically based.
So why the heck is there 653 currencies on coinmarketcap.com ?
1. Have we lost our minds?
2. Is greed causing this problem?
3. Are we shooting ourselves in the foot by over complicating this space for regular people?
I can answer the last 3 questions.
YES, YES, and YES.
HELP ME:
I plan to speak more about this on the Fri Oct 7th mumble radio show if you click on this link to ANOTHER post and vote up the