For more than three years now I have not only been observing the crypto space, breathing and feeling it. Also as a developer I came to know many cryptocurrencies, their concepts, their environments, development standards and community management.
Picture thankfully taken from: https://pixabay.com/de/kreise-finger-ber%C3%BChren-icon-sozial-1276248/
When I joined the scene beginning of 2014, I wanted to get engaged as soon as possible, as much as possible. As I did. I also realized, there are people with tons of money, who act different than the usual people that have money. That money the people were using was Bitcoin and worth around 600-700 USD when I joined. It just came from the 1,200 USD peak and was about to drop to 100 USD again in the coming years. So people were not sure if this will survive or not, even though everybody was kind of sure this concept was too brilliant to fail. These „rich“ people, throwing around big sums of bitcoin were mostly people that bought in at a very low rate, looking to gain more by making smart investments. But there was not much to throw Bitcoin at, a few startup-currencies and private deals, the infrastructure to fiat was yet to be build. You were never sure if those people could really implement what they claimed or were looking to gain Bitcoin themselves. But the roots of many companies have been set, which are still striving.
For myself, I have always called this the „first generation Bitcoin“. I kind of felt myself belonging to the second generation, as I entered when the first real Bitcoin „forks“ with radically improved or changed protocols were being built. The Bitcoin Blockchain was being enhanced and features have been added, cryptography was made profitable and gained a huge new userbase. People started to speak more about Blockchain, crowdfundings or Smart Contracts.
This eventually lead to what I call the third generation, the crowdfunding generation. Which started mostly in beginning of 2016 and is still striving now. It will possibly last for a while, since Blockchain, Bitcoin and the whole environment spreads the word, especially with so many new companies being built, institutions being formed and the technology studied.
I, myself, am looking forward to all the new generations coming. In my mind, a different generation does not mean the old ones are going away or the values should be scattered along the way. Every generation brings new ideas, values and concepts. The mixture of many of them will create new phantastic ideas. To sum it up, I see the following generations:
0: Genesis generation – 2009-13
1: Second generation – 2013-16
2: Crowdfunding generation – 2016 – x
3: yet to be seen.
