I find these kinds of articles entertaining.
Essentially the article is positive with quotes like:
We’re in the early stages of a revolution, watching the financial industry be both disrupted and democratised. Clearly, this is the future.
However, there is warning about bubbles, especially in regards to tokens that have no utility. He is right in what he says, there are thousands of tokens out there,
“There are now a staggering 7773 cryptocurrencies, according to Coinmarketcap (compared to 180 traditional currencies across the world!),”
But he is wrong to compare them to the 180 currencies.
The reason is that even though they can behave like currencies in the buy and sell for good and services respects, they are more than currencies too. How much is a star on Twitter worth, a heart on Instagram, a like on Facebook, a follow on YouTube? Probably, nothing to most users other than a bit of a dopamine kick, but these are monetized tokens that are used to generate income for the platforms that utilize them. They aren't directly monetized 1:1, but they are used to sort content into popularity and sell advertising. The entire internet is already tokenized, we just don't see much of it.
Think about Search Engine Optiization (SEO) for example. Who do you think that is for? Ah, you think it is for the user to be seen and monetized? Nope - that is just the incentive to do it. It is actually for the search engines to categorize and segment the mass of information in order to better serve tailored pay-per-click advertising to viewers so that they can increase their advertising revenues.
Advertising income is around 95% of Facebook's and over 80% of Alphabet's (Google) income, so it is vital that they are able to monetize the content and in order to keep their profits, ensure they don't return much to content creators. While everyone designs their content to trigger SEO, what people are actually doing is fitting themselves directly into the platform monetization model, where the cookie-cutter, clickbait, look-at-me content can be found.
The platforms that serve this kind of content don't care about the content itself, nor about getting the best and most suitable content to a particular user, it is about what content brings in the most revenue. The more people clamor for visibility, the more competition in these areas and the cheaper it becomes for content,
A brilliant quote on my post I am stealing from 
you're actually paid on what it would cost to replace you.
Since there is an endless supply of people wanting to taste the fame and fortune of internet influencer wealth, the cost of replacement is incredibly low. And with the fact that they are able to manipulate the entire ecosystem they control to drive their profits up, if one contributor gets to expensive, they just find another cheaper and funnel the views in that direction. They do not need to ban or demonetize, they just redirect the flow of consumer attention.
All of this profit is enabled through the tokenization of activity, much like activity is tokenized on Hive - the difference being is in that quote above about the democratization of the financial industry, except it isn't limited to finance alone. It is also going to disrupt the entire monetization model of the internet, one where the consumer, user and creators have been largely cut out of for the last 20 years.
This drive toward direct peer-to-peer transactions of value based on all kinds of interactions, returns the internet to a far more human valuable network, where the distribution and incentive to create puts focus on market differentiation, not clickbait ubiquity that is being monetized by the platforms. This means that instead of the centralized algorithms designed to maximize profits deciding what is popular and rewarded, it will increasingly be us, the consumer, through a million different tokenized interactions.
While I do think that most of those 7000+ tokens will fail due to no usecase, there is space for far more than that to play a role in the democratization of the internet itself. They are not currencies that serve no purpose other than a token of value, they are tokens that have value because they serve a purpose of some kind in and of themselves. This could be to manage and order content like it can on Hive, or hold usage and trade value like it can on a Splinterlands NFT, or just catalog popularity, or trace shares, or whatever.
And all of this personal transacting, tracking and distribution is going to be handled across chains and tokens automatically through Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAO) that do not care about making a profit, as they are just lines of code. Profits of course will be made in similar ways to now, but a lot of the middleman services and algorithms that drive the pay-per-click traffic will fall increasingly out of favor, in favor of people just going about their day, doing the things they enjoy doing, driving the economy on usage.
Yes, suggested content and the like will still be present, but it will have to actually serve a purpose, rather than provide filler content. This means that it will have to be valuable to the enduser in more ways that as a distraction and a time waste. The more people participate in an economy where they are able to generate wealth, the more sensitive they become to what has actual value for them and where they will spend their wealth.
The "free internet" has never been free - it is a lie. We are all paying for it through our consumptive habits, but the vast majority of us have no access to the income model other than the consumer side. We are all paying for the "free content" delivered to us and just like "free to air" TV, the quality is rapidly decreasing to the point that it looks like it has been predigested and already evacuated. As a result, over the last decade we have been increasingly driven to pay for the content on the internet through streaming services anyway and we have never paid as much as we are paying now. Netflix revenue is over 2 billion dollars per month. And that is just one service.
We are willing to pay for content and once we get organized into decentralized service structures that can do the same as Netflix and Spotify without very top-heavy income models, we can actually better reward contributors, as we can take that very fat middleman fee, and distribute it back to users, whether they be creators, consumers or investors.
At a global level, this fundamentally changes not only the internet, but the effects that the internet has on our world, including the power of narrative the centralized organizations hold that affect our decision making processes on all things - whether we are buying a car, taking a drug or the way we are going to cast our vote. As such, this shifting of the income model to a distributed system changes the way the economy works as a whole, and in combination with the disruption of the financial industry - everything as we know it today, changes too.
The urgent warning of the article looks at the potential for loss, but the real warning is extracted from that first quote above:
Clearly, this is the future.
Urgent cryptocurrency warning:
Ignore it at your own risk.
Taraz
[ Gen1: Hive ]