I have to admit that sometimes I feel a little disappointed in what seems like an ongoing downward spiral in the world of alt coins.

And sometimes I am given to pause and consider whether the many critics of the Cryptosphere are actually right, and that — aside from a handful of the major currencies — pretty much everything else that's out there is a load of crap.

It's Not MAGIC, You Know...

People talk an awful lot about "blockchains" and "Web 3.0," and sometimes the tone they take is that we have some kind of magic pill that's going to make everything in the world pink roses and unicorn dust.

I really do understand where the skeptics are coming from. The vast majority of what's out here in the Cryptosphere seems like it has no plan at all. There's just a declaration (Fancily termed "White Paper") that somebody has fired up a blockchain, and now they have a crypto token and it's going to be "indispensable" to this particular group of people but there's no actual business plan to back it up.

Perhaps that is the thing that bothers me the most about a lot of Web 3.0 talk. It's like people expect this magic to happen, but nobody really pays much attention to the tangible underpinnings required for that magic to manifest.

Translating it out into the 3D World... here it would be a bit like somebody saying "I'm going to start a furniture store!" But all they know is that they need to have a furniture store and other than that they have no idea where the actual furniture is going to come from and where they're going to display it for sale and who's going to buy it and if that person (or people) are even going to buy it, nor how much money that's going to bring in. It's like simply having the furniture itself and the "statement" of "having the furniture" is all that's needed for mindblowing success. Maybe I am also a skeptic, but to me that's just magical thinking.

Bringing this in a little closer to home, I'm trying to examine it in the context of Hive's own second layer tokens, as we see them by the hundreds on Hive-Engine. The vast majority of them seem to just be somebody issuing a token and somehow that's supposed to "do something," with no further effort.

If there's an illusion here — or maybe we should call it the elephant in the room — it is that all this stuff is going to happen by itself without action being taken.

I look around at what people have built here on Hive, and I can easily detect that the success of Splinterlands is the result of there actually being something there.

There's a game, and it has game components, and people are buying into the game in order to play the game. The fact that there are associated tokens and NFTS is merely the mechanics that makes the game run. The token some sell is not the product, the game is the product.

Communities... With a Plan

At the community level, I see Leo Finance — now INLEO enjoying a measure of success again because there is an actual business plan there. The Leo token is merely the fuel in the mechanism. But the Leo token is not the end product. There is an actual plan — multiple plans, even — to produce revenues and there is a business.

It's one of the reasons I am also cautiously enthusiastic about the new Holozing game which appears to be something that has a real plan to back up the tokens. And I think that is an essential part of getting Web 3.0 to actually become something other than a pipe dream that some seem to have persuaded themselves is going to just manifest all by itself.

I realize an opinion like this might not be popular with a lot of people, but have you looked around? Have you seen all the tokens that people start with great fanfare about how they are "game changing," and 2 years later something that once sold for $5 a token now sells for a fraction of a cent? And why is this? Well, it seems likely that it's because people simply see what is being offered as an opportunity to own the token and then when they've made some profit on it sell it and otherwise have no interest whatsoever in the project!

Alas, that approach will get you nowhere, fast!

Thanks for coming to visit, and do leave a comment if you feel so inclined!

=^..=

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Posted with proof of brain