The crypto community is a mess
Crypto is yet another polarizing topic these days. Some people are trying to figure out what the hell is going on with it, while most everyone else seems to have already made up their mind, and they usually don’t like to have their decisions questioned.
As for me, over the past few years I went from not caring much about blockchains and crypto, to being 100% behind it, to now being afraid of it.
First of all, the tech is great
Those who deep-dive into the problems and possibilities of cryptocurrencies, blockchains, Bitcoin, and smart contracts can find very interesting implications about the future of governance and finance.
I love following Vitalik Buterin’s blog to see what kinds of problems need to be tackled to make future infrastructure more secure, fair, and inclusive for everyone - not just crypto-bigots (pun intended) and oligarchs. It’s a joy to think about possible solutions and try out prototypes using web3 tools.
That we can weaponize cryptography to enable trustless services seems both like a natural progression from the militaristic origins of modern cryptography, and a huge innovation - kinda like the internet itself. It gives me hope that we can find a way to organize society to tackle our most pressing issues.
The community though... holy shit
What I’m currently seeing, as to the real world manifestation of these innovations, fills me with dread. It’s feeling more and more like the jerk-offs who ruined our current system are being replaced with their ideological offspring to create an even worse one.
Influencers are trading absolutely useless non-fungible tokens for hundreds of thousands of dollars, proclaiming the joys of their hedonistic excesses as if it’s a good argument for others to join in. NFTs are intrinsically useful for a variety of things in a blockchain-ified world, like, I don’t know: tickets, identifiers, certifications, and deeds. But pictures of bored apes aren’t tickets, and they don’t integrate with any kind of system to be of any utility. We can clearly see that. These people are creeps.
Then we have the Bitcoin priests, with their slicked back hair, black t-shirts, and jeans.
And they’re all making sure we know that anyone who doesn’t get on board is going to die - and anything other than Bitcoin is blasphemy. They're so insecure about it that they've decided to become like the Spanish Inquisition.
Besides them, we have shitcoin hustlers making useless services that either enable the excesses of the influencers, or are straight up scams to steal as much money from people as they can. I guess they’re savvy and unethical creeps.
Enter: The old guard
Finally, as if all these creeps weren’t enough, the elite hegemony have noticed crypto and have seemingly decided to try and co-opt it. The mainstream media and its sympathizers constantly pump out smears about how crypto is useless and evil. They tell sob stories about how some poor grandma bought a shitcoin that crashed and caused her to lose her home, and her dog. Bitcoin is killing the planet, man! And hackers buy drugs with it! Often, they mock blockchain technology itself, acting as if it’s so ridiculous that anyone would find it useful for anything - after all, it’s just a glorified database, right?
Meanwhile, every central bank in the world is furiously trying to develop its own blockchain-based coin. You can look at their progress on this CBDC tracking map. Ostensibly, they simultaneously believe cryptocurrencies to be useless and evil, but also the future of money. A great way to maximize control over all finance, and in turn: all of us.
These particular creeps aren’t trying to help anyone either. They’re just trying to destroy any possibility of an open-source, decentralized, and for-the-people solution.
What they’ve done is taken all of the focus away from the real threats, and made us argue about whether or not Bitcoin uses as much energy as the cruise ship industry.
It's like we're in the eye of a storm
There's no doubt that this situation has been influenced by our recent past, with the seemingly endless stream of calamity and political strife. It's also influenced by how we see the future. I guess most people are just trying to maximize their bottom line or take refuge in ideologies that they hope will win out, as they see more problems coming on the horizon.
But I think this behavior from the crypto enthusiasts is self-destructive. Do we want decentralized systems, or do we want more dollars and clout? All this posturing and money chasing is delegitimizing and distracting.
Something needs to change to re-align the vision for the technology before the inevitable clamp-down by states and existing institutions, and before it gets taken over by psychopaths. Otherwise, this is in danger of devolving into a huge dumpster fire for everyone.
I have been to that dark place, immersed in multiple communities involved with crypto and DeFi and totally agree that it can be a toxic place, loaded with maxis, scammers and just outright nasty people. The good thing is, we can choose to opt out of the nonsense and focus on building instead.
I decided to give CT a rest and this has definitely helped bring some peace of mind. Additionally, being very selective in choosing we do spend time with helps. Choose the right projects, the right community, etc.
Focus on the signal, not the noise.
Negative focus bias is a pain :)
What's CT though?
Crypto Twitter :)
This is well written and I agree with a lot of what you said. The crypto world feels very much like the Wild West. The technology behind blockchains and crypto is fascinating but I still feel like we’re trying to figure out what it’s best suited for. I see a lot of high paying jobs for Web3 programmers and I just wonder if this is going to be a bubble that bursts sometime soon or if it’s here to stay. Time will tell.
I agree with the central point of the post, but have some comments on a couple of key aspects. There is definitely potential in a tokenised crypto economy, but BTC/Blockchain ecosystem is just one technological approach to this.
Unfortunately, for all the reasons you point out (and others - social/technical/financial++) it's been badly warped in its execution. You can blame a lot of those bad actors for the global regulations that are about to hit.
This is objectively not true, but that hasn't stopped a lot of money being thrown at it by VC's, or a lot of smart people trying to make it work better. They have a huge vested interested in keeping the BTC/Blockchain ecosystem plates spinning. Subjectively, the tech is great because a lot of people got rich off it, and "You can’t convince someone who won the lottery that buying lottery tickets was a bad strategy regardless of how much mathematical proof you show them."
Being objective, it has a lot of "issues".
There was an interesting post here: "A Regulator Asks My Advice on Blockchains for Musicians" https://tedgioia.substack.com/p/a-regulator-asks-my-advice-on-blockchains where I replied with some points relevant to this, so I'll just copy.pasta it here (slight edits):
---Snip---
Blockchain is a bit of misdirection in terms of a tokenized economy, music or otherwise.
"The Blockchain" (and its associated BTC/Shitcoin/NFT++ ecosystem) is just one form of Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) that can implement tokenized assets with a cryptocurrency ecosystem.
Blockchain is arguably demonstrated to be the worst form of a DLT for many reasons: slow, inefficient, energy hungry/abuser, centralised "decentralisation", environmentally unsound (POS/POW/POStorage++), security holes you can drive a truck through, expensive fees++. From a technical perspective, this article has a good analysis of the issues: https://blog.dshr.org/2022/02/ee380-talk.html
See hashgraph based Hedera tokenization paper, for one example of a far better technical solution to the problems inherent in a blockchain approach: https://hedera.com/use-cases/tokenized-assets
---snip---
ref: https://tedgioia.substack.com/p/a-regulator-asks-my-advice-on-blockchains/comment/5178362?utm_source=url
This isn't true either. As mentioned above, blockchain is just one form of a DLT, and DLT's may not even be needed for a CBDC.
eg:
https://www.theblockcrypto.com/linked/132971/mit-boston-fed-go-public-with-project-hamilton-central-bank-digital-currency-research
I wouldn't say they've been furiously trying to develop it either, they have been studying Digital Currencies methodically for a quite a while. For them, it's evolution, not revolution.
Apologies if I seem a little anal-retentive about technical definitions of DLT approaches (eg: Blockchain vs hashgraph), but as engineers we need to be precise when we are talking about technology, as there are both conceptual and practical implementation issues if you don't.
Your central point also illustrates that this is ultimately a socio-technological systems issue, not just technological.
It's being done already, just without the hype.
Have a look at the Hedera ecosystem for some inspiration of a cleaner approach to a tokenised crypto economy. Open source is also a key part of their approach: https://hedera.com/learning/open-source-at-hedera
That said, as BTC/Blockchain ++ ecosystem issues amply illustrate, open source by itself doesn't encourage altruistic behaviour.
It also has interoperability with EVM, so it's not a case of either/or as well. They have a bunch of developers trying out different ideas too. I tried out one of the gig economy platforms based on it (a job to report on the current state of global crypto regulations, as it happens;-) and it was pretty smooth for a beta.
I'd love to talk to anyone interested as well, so hit me up if you want to talk/explore more.
I'm skeptical of Hedera considering the council, which are part of the old guard (Boeing, Google, IBM), its governance model (the council decides), and the fact that Ethereum 2.0 launches in June.
While scepticism of any org is always warranted until proven otherwise, your "new guard" isn't batting too well so far. Their greed, rapaciousness, and hubris is at least as good as anything from Wall St, City of London, or Sand Hill Rd.
Hedera's roadmap is towards "The Hedera network will become public and fully permissionless — any individual or organization can run a node anonymously and earn HBAR cryptocurrency for assisting with network operation. This is the path Hedera will take, ensuring security at every point along the path, to fully realize its mission of becoming the most decentralized public permissionless ledger in the market."
https://hedera.com/learning/what-is-hedera-hashgraph
We'll see. Hedera is only one example of alternative solutions, btw.
In any event, this is a human problem as much as a technological one, and my point is there are more solutions in the DLT/crypto space than BTC/Blockchain++ with all the technical debt and grift baggage attached to it.
That's not going to change anytime soon, even in another bear market/crypto winter.
I wouldn't hold your breath on that, but good luck anyway.
1000%. The community is losing trust with the public by the hour. Regaining that trust is going to be difficult (see: the cost of user acquisition versus the cost of user reactivation). And the decentralized PR team isn't working.
An example being in games, where many in the game industry and many of their fans are pushing back against NFTs, and because most of this crowd cannot seem to disassociate NFTs other parts of the ecosystem, blockchain and crypto altogether.
In one breath, crypto and NFT enthusiasts react with hostility, dismissing people if not completely tearing them down, alienating them and ignoring their concerns under the cover of NGMI.
In the next breath, they ask that same person to back, play, and participate in their games.
That doesn't sound like a wise long-term business strategy.
If the crypto community has a good response to alleviate the concerns of the gaming community, they aren't telling gamers. It may be because they don't have a solution (that is the prevailing assumption). Or, it may be because they simply aren't listening in the first place.
I agree. It's the Wild West.
I've been building crypto research tools for the last 15 months (https://moonfactor.com), watching market, social and developer activity on thousands of projects.
What I discovered was the vast majority of "investors" pouring their money into crypto have no interest in supporting solid projects -- they knowingly flip scams and shitcoins. If you look around the research space what you'll see is an astounding amount of interest for tokens which have just launched. People flock to websites where you can list and vote on new tokens (which are completely gamed by early holders) or pile into presales/ICOs/IDOs.
The tools for taking advantage of human players are getting better, too. Look at AnySniper or BogFinance which are building sniper bots that anyone can use to buy tokens as early as possible and dump them later.
Now with the market reeling and user engagement dropping off I am on the verge of walking away entirely. Kinda regret getting involved.
The community is a result of the wrong propaganda that has been made, crypto for 90% have become bets and scam and it is obvious, if people hear that guy has become a millionaire in a short time and that the other guy has sold an nft for 10 million in 24h, what do you expect.... there are too many people who are convinced that this bubble will burst and leave room for good projects, I believe that the mud will always be there and will always be a lot and that we will have to swim in the middle and hope not to sink.
YES. The most annoying aspects of the crypto communities are:
1, FUD spreading;
2, FOMO 'psychology';
3, PUMP & DUMP ideology ;
4, NFT misusage;
...but what can I say... it just aligns 1to1 with nowadays' general lifestyle:
1, that service / product is the best / worst;
2, buy this ”great” special offer NOW because there are ”only a few left” (especially digital ones);
3, buy this service and this product and the next one in the series and the next one... oh no: that company just closed! What am I going to do with all these products or services now? Eh, no problem, there are other companies & services & products to buy...;
4, oh look: fidget spinners, football cards, cheap cosmetics, same books with different covers, the newest meme t-shirts etc etc etc
Do all these sound familiar?..
Right, a reflection of our consumerism in a new light, and probably also exacerbated by economic woes.
State controlled digital currencies are the road to tyranny. We will be freer and have a much brighter future if a decentralized solution wins. For the sake of the planet, I hope it’s either something new or that ethereum makes it to 2.0.
The opportunists and scammers flooding into the scene don’t worry me as much. They do that anywhere there’s opportunity: internet, tv, radio, anywhere. The fact that crypto is where the opportunity is and they’re flooding in doesn’t make the whole thing rotten, just like it didn’t for previous waves of opportunity.
Right, I'm not so worried about the scammers themselves, but how they're becoming the face of the community. If people spend too much time engaging with all that stuff, and participating in it, then state controlled digital currencies will just waltz right in through the back door and that'll be the end of it.
Basically all I'm saying is: let's make cool shit now, or else the NFT bros will make it harder for us.
They’re becoming the face of the community according to who? Traditional media with deep ties to various governments? Most bloggers / twitter users? A16Z?
If the answer is the first, then it’s more difficult because whatever is going on, they’ll focus on the least sympathetic portion.
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I have met tons of fantastic people in crypto. It is a pity that you are of such a bad opinion towards the whole community but I assure you that maybe you just haven’t met the right guys. Maybe there is something wrong with the trading platform you are using? Then have a look at this very useful article https://bitcoin-trading.io/gemini-uphold-which-is-the-best to make the right choice this time :)
Everyone likes to dunk on crypto in bear markets but when things are looking up, people stop commenting. It's just the way it's going to be until we see mainstream adoption IMO.
A lot of hype and great parties but unfortunately not a lot of actionability. It's like the gold rush those selling shovels (Coinbase, FTX, Gemini, Opensea) are getting rich while it's a wash for most of the others.
I agree with the fact that these communities can be crazy, most definitely are. I think that to navigate the crypto world, you:
Have to just jump all-in in the community;
Have to selectively understand what you should follow.
I'm choosing the path nr 2. Trying to take a step back from the crazies and focusing in on getting more constructive information.
Good one. Thanks
Well, I don't think the crypto world is as messy as you said. The world is modernizing, and at the same time, our thinking should be modernized. People will no longer make money through physical work but online. I'm neutral on crypto. I don't think any of us know what will happen to cryptocurrencies in a few years, but we have to live in the present. I don't want to say that crypto is my life, but I can firmly say that it has a special place in my life, bringing me a pretty high passive income. I have been investing in BTC for many years, and the successes are wonderful. I buy cryptocurrencies from https://cryptex.net , and all is alright. Until I practically lost no money. I hope it will be like this always.
Hey clown, did anyone ask where you bought crypto from?
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