The future is nothing residing nowhere. Everyone can speculate about the future taking no responsibility at all. That’s why any promise can remain uncondemned whatever consequences it may bring. If I promise to deliver some goods some day in the future, nobody is able to take me at my word because I am the only master of my words. My words represent my variant of the future — who can challenge my private fiction universe? The future lives in our thoughts offering a safe shelter to any mental speculation for which we can ever find words in our vocabulary. Mass media is nothing but the reflection of our thoughts that make our public assumptions, predictions, forecasts, commitments, promises, and even obligations regarding some future deals invulnerable to any liability.
The irresponsibility of the future is absorbed by the current crypto world where ephemeral products promised to be created at some future date engender an enormous movement of funds in the present. It seems people change their actual money for “ghost” products existing only in the whitepapers. What do people get in return? Just tokens.
“This is all about the economy, baby”, as one of the former American presidents used to say. Tokens are wonderful with their self-sufficiency. Being created by promises they can play no part in keeping those promises. The future products and services laying behind their tokens are irrelevant at all. Who cares about whether the products appear as a consequence of their ICOs or not while the tokens are traded in the market bringing real profit now?
Of course, some happy pills in the form of pre-alphas wouldn’t go amiss. But a finished product works better for complacency of the investors. Look at one of the illustrative and typical cases plenty of which is available on the internet now: a famous crypto project whose creators are so proud of those > $200 million they collected through several rounds of their ICO after several years of the feverish activity. What is that important and valuable product they offer in the end?
A centralized crypto wallet. Holly crypta! A wallet! For more than $200M! Do we suffer from the lack of crypto wallets to add another one? No, we really don’t. What we need is the tokens issued by this project supported by the wide and expensive publicity and protected by the positive feedback of various financial bigwigs and crypto celebrities. We need the tokens to pump them with funds just for successful speculations in the stock market. Now. Today. Is the wallet worth $200M? Beyond any doubt it is! Another Super Mario or Tetris would be equally worthwhile and valuable be they offered instead of the wallet by those remarkable crypto folks. And of course, we are waiting for the next round of their ICO with impatience.
The trends of the times, one may say about the contemporary ICO craze propelling tokens just for tokens. It seems the entire crypto economy is coming to token sales only. The fancy rhetoric about blockchain, decentralization, and crypto anarchy looks like a pure literature aimed at prettifying the old merry financial bubbles. Some may argue that this is just the traditional capitalism when demand creates supply: people pay for what they need. But how about the post-capitalistic promise of the crypto movement? What about the libertarian values of the decentralized economy, self-governance, financial and social equity that are propagated by the crypto anarchy? When will the New World come? Where is the spirit of the true freedom flying?
We are falsifying and mystifying ourselves when proliferating token sales are accepted as a sign of the successful evolution of the crypto economy. The projects like that crypto wallet (which is not actually crypto as such being a conventional server-depended centralized service using crypto discourse for self-promotion only) add nothing but greed to those investors who buy their tokens. Such projects (constituting the majority nowadays, unfortunately) compromise the very idea of crypto anarchy propagated by only several really liberating projects and communities.
Not the spirit of human courage and dignity but fear is the primary mover of those guys who are looking for the ICO hype only. The fear to stay out of the gold rush of token sales still remaining unregulated by the state authorities. The fear of losing their investment opportunities while cryptocurrencies are still growing, tokens are greatly appreciated, and the quantum computer is still under construction. That very fear of facing the public awareness when numerous fake and sub-crypto projects having nothing meaningful and valuable for the society are rejected by the wide audience as a symbol of the obsolete and miserable capitalistic self-interest.
Think twice while investing in tokens. Look for a new technology or a socially valuable initiative in the background of crypto projects. Escape the fear of being left behind any promising ICOs. Once the crypto evolution is going on, it keeps the survival of the fittest that will inevitably deselect everything lucre-centric. Don’t miss the forest for the trees.