Today someone I have been trying to get into crypto for four years said to me,
"I think I am two years too late."
I think he is wrong.
I don't know the future, but people getting in now would still be considered early adopters in many respects, as while they might have missed the early adopter boat on Bitcoin, that isn't the case for the industry itself. It is kind of like saying I missed the boat on the dotcom bubble era, so I am going to live as if there is no value to be made in everything that is going to be built in the digital economy, the social platforms, the shopping platforms, the data platforms, the smartphones, the gaming
... the blockchains and the crypto.
While currently most of the industry is speculating on token assets that may or may not have value, the future value of the industry is going to be on the business side of things, in the same way it has been for every successful past industry. Using the dotcom boom as an example is handy, as while trillions were made by the early adopters who then dumped on the retail investors who kept buying into vaporware companies, hundreds of trillions has been generated since in the last two decades since, as pretty much every business and individual is using the technologies, products and services daily.
The trouble is for people like my friend, is all they can see is Bitcoin and when coming from the conditioning of low yield gains on stocks, a 1200% gain in the last year and 60,000 dollars appears like it must be the top. It doesn't matter that the cap is only a trillion dollars, people look at it like a stock similar to Apple, and Bitcoin doesn't even have a product or service - so it can't possibly be worth more than Apple.
For the ordinary person, it is hard to visualize what is going on and it is hard to visualize even for the people who have bought a bit of Bitcoin on the hype with which to speculate. While this is more active than for example buying into a managed fund, I think most people would be quite shocked and confused to see what someone like me "goes through" each day in order to participate.
While a couple of my colleagues feel like they are participating and putting in effort because they have a price chart open and read a few articles about where price might go, buying a few dips, just imagine if they watched the daily activity of someone like me, someone like many of us.
Hive is simple
Yes, very, very simple. It is not much different to signing up to Facebook or Twitter and then posting. The complexity isn't in this, it enters when the economic and financial side comes into play, especially once earning. I remember posting for about 2 months before I finally plucked up the courage to ask how the hell things actually worked here and what I am meant to do to be able to shift some of these tokens that supposedly had some value. Most people aren't used to this side of thing - yet, this is still simple.
Trading
This gets a little more complex. When I started trading on Poloniex (haven't used it in years, will never again) I was trying to maximize my dollar value and for a few weeks, I was doing pretty well, til it all kind of crashed. Then I realized, I had actually lost crypto by maximizing dollar value, so I changed my strategy to maximizing tokens, not worrying about price. That worked out better, unttil I realized I also needed some dollars to buy the dips with. I got better over time.
Yet, this is foreign to most average people, as they see investing as giving their investment manager license to use their money. Doing it as an individual is a different thing and comes with a different set of skills and is subject to a much harder emotional rollercoaster, as the responsibility of the ups and downs falls squarely on the shoulders of the trader. Tokens go up, projects disappear - tokens are lost. This is a world by itself.
Projects
And then we get into the convoluted world of projects and "projects" where no one can really be sure which are going to try to build something, and which are going to exit scam. Yet, everyone wants to get in early and make those mad gainz. There are thousands of projects out there, thousands of whitepapers, millions of little technical details that attempt to attract investors by purporting to do something important - most of it is shit that will never be built and many are just cash grabs. But, you better "stay informed" otherwise you are going to miss out. And if you do invest, you better track that sucker like a hawk and try to sniff out the exit before it happens and all your tokens are zeroed.
DeFi
Where the hell do I start with this and how the hell am I meant to explain this to newbie who has only heard of Bitcoin and thinks it is overbought? How do you talk through all of the considerations, the differences beytween, where the value comes from, the risks, the necessary wallets and blockchains, the fees, the tokenomics the...
This is a fulltime job
All of this takes a lot of work and I know that for those who are truly active and attending to this and more daily like me, it requires a lot of effort and of course, mistakes happen, bad decisions are made, the gut takes a punch but, the show has gotta go on. I work two fulltime jobs as well as this, I know the effort required, but I think that if I was to sit my friend down for 24 hours so that he could see everything that is going on and the speed at which it happens, he'd be scared.
The real value generators
Of course, not everyone has to work like I or many of us do, but it is "us" who are adding value into tis industry daily and while we as individuals might do very well out of it, the value we add is far greater than what we are going to extract. I am not talking the value of this post or the 4500 other ones I have written on this blockchain, nor the trading value, or the support of projects - I am talking about the value that all of these activities compound into to make an industry, where people like my friend, will be able to use crypto in their daily life through millions of businesses, platforms, games and whatever else there is to come. What we are doing as individuals is building the infrastructure that will get normalized into society and become as invisible to the average person as the protocols that serve the data to their smartphone.
Every industry had a start
Every industry that has ever been created had us. It isn't the early adopters, it is the people who are getting stuck in all of the little details, building and trialing technologies, making errors, getting punched in the stomach (sometimes near daily for years) in order to get some wins, make some gains. What we don't recognize is that the gains we are generating at the moment are just a fraction that the industry will develop atop what we have enabled. It will do this for decades to come, in the same way that the industrial revolution that began in the mid 1700s is still generating value today.
What we do now will be adding to our world and will underpin our global economies after we are all dead and gone and all our tokens that were so important and potentially made us rich - are completely irrelevant. Yet - many people believe they are two years too late.
No one has to keep up with us, in order to benefit from what we do.
Taraz
[ Gen1: Hive ]