When Bitcoin first came up, it was a sign of hope to all that have been crashed under centralized finance. Not because it was digital money, but because it was money that no one owned. There was no office, no CEO and no one could turn it off. It was there, you could use it without permission. It looked so new and felt so right.
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But now, the space is very busy and different. There are coins launching every week. Teams raising millions of dollars before a product is even there. Small groups making quiet decisions that affect how everything works. Some chains are very fast and some have good apps and celebrities. But that doesn't seem to change a typical person's life. The person just wanted to hold some money without intermediaries and rules changing overnight.
Bitcoin wasn't great in the past, it was slow, hard to use at times but one thing it had was truth of concept. The thing was reliable. It wasn't a request based system. It didn't change to make people feel safe for holding. That meant a lot to me.
You didn't ever have to wonder whether someone like Trump or a billionaire was playing puppet master behind it. It was inclusive.
Now we have tokens and pre sales and insides and more crypto top perks. Communities feels less like movements and more like fan clubs. The earlier promise of freedom, and fairness and control has been diminished by noise. If it isn't that crypto matured, it matured in a way that leaves so many lost.
We still have time to salvage what it was. But it will take work. We will have to disallow for immediacy and accept that this was never about speed or profits. It was about being able to have something that couldn't be taken away from you or edited or owned. It was something real. And obviously, perhaps the hardest thing we could do is accept what we initially thought was easy.