Bold statement huh?
Did it get your attention?
Obviously, this is designed for some shock and awe but there is some truth to naming this blog post that. And if you keep reading, hopefully it'll make sense to you.
Today I was on X having a back and forth with a good offline buddy of mine. He brought up something very painful in my life that happened in April of 2017. That was the month that everything changed for me. After building businesses online for almost 20 years and using PayPal for 17 years straight as my main payment processor, they sent me a notice that my account was getting shut down.
No reason, no explanation. All correspondence was met with 'our decision is final'. And thus began my journey of reinvention.
I was an entrepreneur, through and through. So after it was clear that PayPal would no longer be an option, I immediately turned to crypto. My business partners at the time decided to take a back seat and I was left to try to 'frankenstein' our payment options for our customers. PayPal was what they were used to, and not many were willing to adopt crypto as an online payment method.
New tech is always hard to convince the masses to adopt.
But this crypto stuff just made sense. I was selling in a digital space, so digital currency just made sense.
And crypto had huge promise. No more banks, it was truly putting the power back into the hands of every day people. I was excited to be an early adopter of this tech, and now it was up to my company and I to convince our customers...This was the future.
And slowly, people came over to the crypto side of things. I built here on the blockchain, promoted it to my community and slowly there has been hundreds of willing adopters that came over to this blockchain. This was the perfect fit for us. And on a personal note, it was the perfect fit for me.
This is where I felt like I had a home. The dreams of decentralization really got me excited for what we could build here....
But then came the pumps.
And then came the dumps....
And then came the crypto bros....
Don't forget the internet gurus that started telling people which crypto tokens to invest in....
Oh yeah, Bitconnect too!
The ups and downs of this new tech was to be expected, but something happened over the past few years and here's where my distaste for this stuff started.
People were more interested in green candles, then they were about changing the world for the better. Maybe it was some crazy utopian dream to see crypto put power back into the hands of every day people....Wishful thinking I guess. Because now we started seeing PayPal, even getting into crypto payments.
More and more we saw real use case blockchains like Hive, fall behind because they never really captured the hype and attention of the traders. Maybe it was poor management , lack of marketing, downvotes, whatever...I personally think it was bigger than anything we did or did not do here.
What happened, as with everything that is new in the tech space, is that greed took over.
It was no longer about changing the world, it was about profits. If you look back at any of my blog posts here over the years, the common trend I would preach was...Use case. Can we actually use this stuff? Sure, I wanted things in the green, I'm not that dumb lol But at the end of the day, I was still living in that utopian dream world of...Changing the world with #web3 and a blockchain that we could use each and every day.
What's the point of this blog post?
Why am I bringing all this up?
I'm still here creating! I'm using this stuff! My mentality is still, one day I will make a living off this stuff, but right now I'm enjoying the ride. I have no idea if Hive and LEO will ever explode into the moon shots we all hope for, but even if it does or does not, it's out of my control.
I can control my effort and attitude here.
So yeah.....Crypto can suck these days. But I think it sucks if you are looking for quick profits day in and day out. If you are using this stuff, the apps, the communities every day, price is secondary.
And I know, that's not a popular opinion. Everyone wants the green candles....
But personally I'm done looking for the green. I just want to actually use something that I believe can still change the world.