Those who throw stones

I was reading another article stating "Proof Bitcoin is finally dead" Yet like all of them, it is looking at the price as the indication and, that price over the space of two years, which in my opinion, doesn't encapsulate the life of Bitcoin, therefore, can't announce its death. It is like announcing the death of the internet at the bursting of the dotcom bubble at the turn of the millennium - it was a little premature, wasn't it?

And I think that this is definitely part of the problem with the way people see crypto, because they are looking at it solely as a speculative asset, not a product group. Yes, it can operate as a currency or an asset class, but ultimately, it is worthless until it is integrated into our daily lives in a similar way to the internet has been - something that adds value for being what it is.

Back in the mid-90s of the internet, it was about finding information and getting the hang of digital sharing of centralized information, but a decade later and increasingly since, it became more about sharing content from a decentralized source, us, and sharing centralized information to us. But, not only this, it also became the backbone of all data sharing, even if we don't see what is happening in the background, such as banking transactions or cloud storage. Shut down the internet now, and society as we know it collapses.

At some point, I envisage that crypto is going to be the same, where it is enabling so much of our daily lives through increasing goods and service offerings, that teasing it out becomes impossible, or at least, very, very disruptive. Currently, with so many people seeing it as only a speculative asset class, it is hard to imagine how many parts of our lives it could affect. And, since we are conditioned to "trust" in the economy we know through experience and usage, picturing alternatives is very difficult.

And, it doesn't seem to matter what the background is of a person, whether they have financial training or technical, they look at crypto through a narrow lens of perspective that is not broad enough to capture the entire value proposition. In many ways, it is like going to a specialist doctor, where all they see are the areas of their specialty and when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

When it comes to crypto, like all technology, people expect it to move faster and mature quicker than it actually does. For example, there are a couple of our AI team in the country at the moment and were talking how when AI gets something wrong, it is seen as a failure - even if it is 1000% more accurate than a human. AI doesn't have to be the best at anything, it just has to be better than the average to offer value.

Crypto adoption is slower than many have expected, even though they should recognize that the difference between the invention of the internet and general introduction was across the space of decades. It should also be noted that in some countries, telecommunications essentially went from nonexistent to mobile technology, skipping the landline phase completely.

When people are looking at crypto adoption, rather than looking at the current state, they should start considering the future positions driven by culture. And what this indicates is that in that future, younger generations are going to have the experience of being cut out of the traditional ownership models of the economy, but also have more access to inclusive models and the financial education that comes part and parcel with them.

This change creates a massive shift, as while currently there is a lot of business hesitation around crypto, as younger decision-makers come into the space, they are going to push business toward what they know, which is freer and more decentralized frameworks, using the kinds of tools they are comfortable with, because they have been using them for a couple decades already - like tokenized earning models.

The "crypto is dead" argument relies on culture staying the same, which means that conditioning of that culture has to support the status quo. The argument is compelling too, because making that status quo hard and slow to change, means making it appear that it is what it is, because that is the only way it can be. This is not the case at all, it is just that this is what we know, meaning that its strengths and weaknesses seem like natural laws.

There are economic laws in play of course, but the code of how the economy works in culture is dynamic, always changing, based on the way the economy is used and, the tools available. Just like how the largest changes in the economy over the last five decades has been in the money market innovations of investment vehicles, there is a new set of tools that are being built, meaning that - there is no longer just a hammer and, we can build a new range of vehicles.

Financial innovation is going to affect all operations and value streams of all kinds, because once a change is implemented, there are knock-on effects that will lead to more changes and more knock-ons. Individually, these will run along various lifecycles, but collectively, there are going to be all kinds of compounding effects involved, both in the positive and the negative. However, with distributed ownership and governance, the market will adjust for the negatives and charter new courses in a continual process of damage mitigation and the desire for improvement.

Crypto adoption is an organic process that is slowed by inorganic and manipulated rulesets, but just because it is moving slowly, doesn't mean that will always be the case. Just like a constant drip of water can erode stone, eventually it can create a weakness that suddenly cracks large amounts of rock away from where it might have been positioned for millennia.

The economy is not "set in stone", it is a representation of our interactions with each other. As we shift the way we behave with each other, the economy will follow suit, continually rewriting the code to fit what we do, not what we think we will do. As we change, it changes and, we are always changing - so, whatever the future economy looks like, being different than today is inevitable. Crypto isn't dead, nor is the legacy economy, as they are part of the greater whole, but the shifting utilization is going to impact on how we live, and how we mark our progress.