I've been into Crypto for close to 10 years and I can't shake the feeling that the situation in the crypto world is not as dynamic as it has once been.
If in 2015, crypto was only known by very few, it's totally different today. I would say that almost everybody has heard about bitcoin and crypto at least once in their lives. However, the perception of what crypto was has also changed in this time frame.
Among the people active at that time, crypto was a way to bypass fiat money, banks, intermediaries. It was a way to take things into our own hands. Everybody could send and get money from wherever on the planet thanks to wallets in a more or less anonymous way.
Today, I received a brochure of my bank telling me that I could now invest in crypto through the bank. This translates very well what crypto has become: a mere investment vehicle. The offer is big in meme-coins for people who want to speculate to rather traditional coins like bitcoin that promise an increase in value over time because of its deflationary nature.
In our days, most see crypto as a way to increase their worth. To do that, they tend to look at the price of the coins and they hope that they will be able to sell them more expansive than what they bought them for.
In 2015, what really attracted me to crypto was the fact that it was possible to transact monetary value almost without transaction costs. It would be perfect for online business or even offline business where with a phone coins could be swapped on the ledger. The technology seemed secure and fast. It is funny to see that 10 years later, we don't really have a wide adoption of this use case. Transaction fees for ETH and BTC went up consequently and no other coin could really fill the gap, probably also because of regulatory and financial reasons.
We have seen a lot of innovation in the blockchain world. We have seen ICO's, NFT's, games built on blockchains, social media built on blockchains and many other things. We have seen great tools like liquidity pools, DAO's or smart contracts but in general all these innovations haven't really had a breakthrough. Great things have come with blockchains but few have had a real impact on the economy in general.
One thing that I've learned in these 10 years is that I don't believe in the magical internet money that makes everybody rich. Nowadays, the crypto prices fluctuate in parallel to all the other investment assets. If Wall Street goes up, so does BTC and with BTC all the altcoins. Many projects have died and many projects were nothing else than scams. There is no such thing as magical internet money where everybody gets rich from a coin that is minted out of thin air.
The value of a coin follows the same laws than any other product. If the demand is higher than the supply, the coin goes up in value and it goes down if the demand is lower than the supply. By playing with the supply, it's possible to let tokens shine for a while but sooner or later things will balance out and tokens will lose their value if the demand is not growing.
As long as people consider crypto as investment vehicle, crypto will gain value when all the markets gain value as well. So crypto will do well when markets boom but they will do badly in recession.
I still believe however that crypto is more than it's value in USD. We have some great examples of chains that offer things that wouldn't be possible without crypto technology. Our mindsets are still too much working in the old schemes. We need to get out of the box. Thanks to crypto we could find new ways for people to work together. We could create new e-commerce solutions. We could create financial solutions to support people and communities. Crypto offers decentralized solutions where people could achieve goals as a community and not as individuals.
As long as our minds are set on getting a maximum of return from crypto, we won't go there however...
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