Imagine, if you will, that crypto is a 3D-printer.
- At first the 3D-printer schematics printed out some basic stuff.
But then the 3D-printer started printing naughty things.
And the people asked...
What is that? Some kind of cigar case?
And then we started printing out dangerous things.
And the people thought...
Wow, this is really getting out of hand.
We should do something.
We should stop this from happening.
But they couldn't stop it, could they?
The open source nature of the schematics and the ease of which is was to get one's hands on a 3D printer and the raw materials created a situation that could not be regulated. No one could stop these printers from going brrr.
And then, these open source maniacs took it a step too far!
For these terrorists decided to build... god forbid... cars!
And then there were cars everywhere!
And they didn't have license plates.
And they could be built for one tenth the cost of a normal car.
The car manufacturers were not happy.
So they did everything in their power to prevent this new paradigm from taking root. They hired lobbyists to make not only these cars illegal, but 3D printers themselves. At the same time, they attempted to use this tech to their own advantage, but the way it worked didn't really mesh well with their assembly lines. They even created propaganda campaigns against 3D printed cars.
And none of it worked.
You see, the creators of the 3D printers had already published their research online for free. So did all the users who created schematics. This was all protected under free speech laws and the first amendment. In addition, those who created the 3D printers themselves and sold them had their own lobbyists and politicians in their back pocket as well. Launching a frontal assault on this emerging economy was much more difficult than expected.
And then the unexpected happened.
One of the engineers created a schematic for a flying car. Now anyone with a 3D-printer would just print out a car... that flew! In the sky! How wild is that? The engineer even published this schematic anonymously. How crazy is that? Did all that work and didn't even take any credit. Who does that?
So now people were just printing out flying cars and flying them around, and the cops were like...
What the actual fuck is going on right now?
That can't be legal!
And it wasn't legal.
Not by a longshot. But it didn't really matter. Because it was so easy to print a flying car and so fun to fly them that nobody really cared that it wasn't legal. Tons of people were doing it, and it wasn't hurting anyone... except for that one time when that guy flew into some power lines... and that other time... and another. AH! I wouldn't worry about it! Worth!
And so the propaganda campaign intensified.
Less people were flying cars these days, but it was still hard to catch the people that did. Now the cops needed flying cars just to police the flying cars, which sparked even more debate about why flying cars should be legal, because the cops flying the flying cars were even worse than the citizens flying them.
And then, the impossible happened.
Someone figured out how to modify the flying cars so that they could break the Earth's gravitational pull and go into space. Now people could fly anywhere on the planet in less than 30 minutes. Communities even started 3D printing a space-station and creating their own city-state government in space and artificial islands within international waters.
Development continued.
Now these spaceships had increased range, and one could fly to the moon with them (and years later, Mars). People started building city-states on the moon and Mars, governed independently from any previously established government on Earth. It was Sparta madness!
Analogy over.
This is exactly where cryptocurrency is going. It is a self-regulating system. The powers that be can not control it, and everyone within these communities has a massive incentive in order to keep the ball rolling. The propaganda and fear-mongering from the legacy systems will be fierce, but they are already so down and out that it's not going to matter.
We've created a technology that is seemingly infinitely scalable from where we are today. Surely, there are limits to how big crypto can scale, but we haven't even hit a single border yet, and computers are still getting faster, cheaper, and gaining storage space every year. That can only help crypto scale exponentially with technology itself.
While it's easy to see how Bitcoin and Ethereum have major scaling limitations, that is not a valid representation of crypto itself. Ethereum has bitten off far more than it can chew, and Bitcoin's niche is large and secure transactions that bridge into the legacy economy.
The limits on something like Hive haven't even come close to being tested. We haven't even had to pick and choose what we want on chain yet, opting to just throw everything on chain because who cares we have the resources to do so. That will not always be the case.
There's also no limit to second layer solutions and other first layer solutions that run on completely different networks and node connections.
Conclusion
Not only is cryptocurrency like 3D-printing in a metaphorical sense, but also 3D-printing will play a huge roll in production in the future. Decentralized production means that all of a sudden a thousand libertarian dads and get together and all create a mini-warehouse in their garage. None of them can build anything of note without the network, but the network exists so they can vote on and build the craziest products with their combined powers.
To anyone says this future is impossible because it will just be made illegal... the scope of that argument is small and limited to the country one is currently in. Sure, such things might be made illegal in America. Doesn't mean they'll be illegal in Uganda. The value and power of this new tech is too great to be stifled by self-righteous politicians. At a certain point people will see the ridiculousness of the old system and just start ignoring it entirely.