My random thoughts on the value of crypto/blockchains:
- decentralized, distributed consensus mechanisms are valuable, clever pieces of tech. (The fact that the first major invention of this tech was by an anonymous person who disappeared should be far more alarming than the world seems to think it is)
- Using blockchains to create digital scarcity is a valuable, clever application of the tech. I expect these to become the default for things like event tickets within 10 years despite all the noise and bullshit around NFTs. That being said: NFTs do not in any way make shitty art valuable/not shitty. The bust of NFT art following the boom was so so so painfully obvious, I don’t understand how so many people got hoodwinked save for humanity’s propensity to be greedy.
- I think the value of cryptocurrencies is way way higher to non-western countries (very much not America) because it’s a border-less/government-less means of transferring value. For places like South America and Africa where the local economies are weak/volatile, the ability to transact in a medium that exists globally should be a great idea. America has a trustworthy financial system, there’s no real need for alternatives (I get that banks and the fed are their own ball of fuckery frequently, but in general, we aren’t Venezuela for example. A dollar is a dollar, it works pretty well almost anywhere).
The issues are:
- for this cryptocurrency mechanism to work as a real currency, it needs to be non-volatile, which would kill the opportunity to speculate (and therefore kill western interests/greed). I need to wake up in my village with the same amount of money I went to sleep with. Basically no crypto projects can offer that guarantee right now (ignoring stable coins)
- It’s highly adversarial to government interests, so they’ll stifle it however possible in general
Projects like Algorand and Chia are super interesting because of the tech and decentralization goals of them. The vast majority of these projects are just utopian libertarian bullshit that gets absolutely rocked when applied to the real world. Also, humans are just very greedy most of the time, so an unregulated space with relatively low friction on-ramps and the promise of wild returns will of course be abused and lead to spectacular blowouts like the last few months have brought.
The tech will continue, and things will rev back up over the next 3-5 years.
Lastly: Crypto still has a terrible user experience across the board. Arcane address hashes, basically no recourse if you make a typo, all the projects selling their inner tech and economic concepts that are just gibberish unless you’re a PhD (translated: doesn’t matter, no one actually cares).
Crypto desperately needs to be Uber-ified. I don’t mean what Uber has become, I mean what it was when it launched: an app with a button and a text field, you typed in where you wanted to go, and a clean slick car picked you up and got you there like magic. They weren’t advertising their routing and matching algorithms, the product was “feel like a rich guy at the push of a button”. Crypto needs a few of these.