I realize that my perspective may not always be very popular because I often tend to play "Devil's Advocate" and say things that may not be so welcome in the hallowed halls of "everything crypto is unquestionably wonderful."
I'll add that it's not that I am out to "find fault" with anything... more a case of wanting to bridge the gap between reality and pure fantasy.
TL;DR:
It's high time the crypto world STOPS being all wrapped up in "Wen Moon" and "Wen Lambo" and focuses on building something actually tangibly useful and sustainable for the long term... otherwise we'll be sitting here 10 years from now, still asking "Wen Moon?"
Onwards...
Time to Grow Up!
So the topic I kind of wanted to touch on in this post is that I really believe it's time for the Cryptosphere to grow up.
What do I mean by "grow up?"
What I mean is that we have fiddled around enough and I think it's high time that this industry stops thinking of itself as a self-contained thing of unrivalled brilliance. To be more specific, "being in crypto" — in and of itself — isn't a sustainable thing. We need to start focusing on what you can do with crypto.
It's like the Internet: Nobody's just "online" and more and thinking that amounts to something. Nobody's just "on Facebook" anymore, thinking that makes them cool.
There seems to be this lingering idea that crypto is just something you own and make a profit with without anybody really going much deeper to figure out... well, what sustains your ability to make a profit with it. If there's nothing tangible there then how is that profit going to be realized?
Sure, you could argue that there are people who are just "in the stock market," but I can guarantee you most of those stocks they are trading are connected to ongoing projects that are doing something.
As I touched upon, in some ways the state of crypto is not unlike the Internet itself. In the early days of the Internet simply being online was considered the coolest thing ever. You'd choose a service provider and you'd make yourself an email account and you would be online and you could tell your friends "I'm online" and that was considered dope. By itself.
But there came a point when that was not enough... and I also have to point out (for historical truth) that it was a bit of a struggle to get past that point. What happened next was that the utopic vision of the Internet just being this giant free exchange of information for everyone was replaced by commerce.
What Are We Going to DO With This Thing?
It was no longer just about the Internet, and people no longer were really able to profit simply from the Internet, profit had to be built by building businesses on the Internet and that came in the form of Commerce.
Now, when I say there was a "struggle" there were, indeed, a lot of people who didn't want to see commerce and they were up against the other people who said "yeah, well, setting up a bunch of servers to run a website is not free... we have to collect money to do so, from somewhere."
Some of the more idealistic early adopters were rather offended by that... they had sincerely wished to keep money out of the picture. But that doesn't work, in the real world.
It's that "fantasy vs. reality thing.
So Let's Return to the Cryptosphere for a Moment
Why do people get involved in crypto?
Well, the vast majority — if you ask them — will admit that they are involved in order to make money somehow. But let's get more specific about it, they are involved in crypto to make money by simply owning some crypto and selling it at profit.
But that really isn't a thing is it? There has to be something other than simply wishful thinking and hoping for a bull run to hold that up, right?
In the legacy financial system, we invest in stocks... of companies that do something, and hopefully end up having revenue and making a profit. Let's call it the creation of value, in some capacity. Not all value is tangible, but there has to be at least perceived value.
Here on Hive...
Here on Hive, a lot of people spend a lot of time wondering "when is Hive going to Moon again?"
Perhaps the more pertinent question would be "WHY should Hive Moon again?"
So when I start talking about Crypto needing to grow up and apply that to our own ecosystem, what I'm really saying is that if we genuinely expect Hive to Moon again, we need more Splinterlands games and we need more InLeo/LeoFinance communities and apps that people can do things with. And we need more of the likes of HiveList and the new social ecommerce initiative from Waivio Labs - which are actually promoting and creating a place for people to conduct commerce - and a little less focus on "wen Moon" and "when do I get my Lambo?"
Why am I railing on about this? Well for the most part because we keep saying that our ultimate goal here is to get towards some kind of mass adoption across a broad scale of the population. And as long as we're stuck in this paradigm of wen Moon, we are excluding the vast majority of people who are going to look at that and say "well, this is just an extraordinarily risky and speculative asset class and I want no part of that!"
Creating Things!
From my — possibly naive! — perspective, further progress is going to come in the form of creating things. It's not that you're not going to make money anymore but the end result is going to be that you're going to make money as a result of DOING something with crypto... not sure what it is you're going to do but you're going to have to do something!
Because if you don't, you're basically just in the vaporware business! If you want to be a "day trader," that's fine... but don't grow too attached to any one specific thing you're trading, because houses of cards don't tend to stand for very long!
Now, I realize there are likely a whole bunch of people who are going to climb out of the woodwork here and spout all sorts of "Web 3.0" idealism at me, but let's take a step back and look at something here. Something slightly ironic, even.
I don't really care who you are, but prosperity is not something that's just going to appear out of thin air like unicorn sparkles from the heavens! There's going to need to be some kind of action taken and some sense of value is going to have to be provided in some capacity. Otherwise you're just engaged and a bunch of wishful thinking that has no legs to walk on.
You can't eat "promises of a brilliant future" for dinner...
What's the ironic part?
Well, lots of blockchainiacs are eternally critical of legacy banking and monetary systems that just "print money" with nothing to back it up. Promising people value in crypto with nothing tangible underlying it is actually not a whole lot different... regardless of whether "it's all accounted for in a blockchain ledger!" That's fine, but just like I can't eat a $100 bill for dinner, I can't eat some dots and dashes in a computer network for dinner!
The promise that something "has value" has to be substantiated in a way the world can generally accept.
So I think it's high time to stop thinking about wen Moon and "when am I going to get 10x on the coins I bought last week," and instead look at how can I put those coins to work in creating something lasting and sustainable that has utility for people, not just a moonshot chance of making you an instant millionaire.
There's something about that mindset that makes me think about an article I read a long time ago about the psychology of becoming a millionaire. The point of the article was if we just instantly made everybody a millionaire, then nobody would actually be rich... and in short order, a loaf of bread would cost $1 million. The people who have true wealth tend to be the ones who create something, not the ones who come into it by accident.
A poignant example of this is the fact that most major lottery winners end up being bankrupt within a very short time because — as the old saying goes — "easy come, easy go." The most recent crypto millionaire might disagree with that but typically the fact of the matter is you have far more value in something you work for than something you would just be handed for free.
I could easily write an entire dissertation about that last point, but I shall refrain!
Anyway, I just think it's time we help the Cryptosphere grow up and put some focus into what we are creating that actually has value and utility to the greater public because that is how we're going to get that same greater public to become part of the crypto gig in the first place!
And with that thought, I'm going to bring this diatribe to a close. The future is bright, but it's not likely to become all shiny by itself.
=..=
Curator Cat 15 October, 2023
