I remember being hunched over my keyboard, eyes plastered against the glow of my monitor in what was quite literally the middle of the night. I'd scrape the new postings on bitcointalk, like many others, desperately hopping on the next new Proof-of-Work coins, throwing my CPU/GPU/early ASIC hardware at them. For many of us that did get in early, it was a long-term hold: mine, save up, join the community, work towards the development to achieve new interest and goals to result in exchange listings and growth.
During this period, coins with any premine percentage, of any sort, regardless of potential reasoning from the developer, were dead on arrival. They were rejected by the space of crypto under the core values that were a standard to live by: decentralisation, open-sourced, and a fair entry for all. Developers were expected to mine or pay up if they wanted access to the coins, as all others would.
I remember being in endless IRC channels for projects, trying my best to work with the community and develop altcoins that actually stood a chance at providing something useful and new to the space. For a while, that was anonymity and ensuring transactions couldn't be traced. It was finding easy ways in which merchants could accept the currency and allow users to use it as such.
With this came the attention to decentralisation. Centralisation meant no anonymity, no fairness, and no safety among users regardless of their actions on the network. There was a decentralisated exchange, CryptoBridge, that used nodes of uses to connect each other and promote the trading of independent cryptocurrency blockchains without KYC and third-parties threatening your funds, whether it's by following your actions, blocking them, or getting hacked. I'd say this was, thus far, the best attempt at a decentralised exchange, despite relying heavily on AWS hosting for nodes.
Fast-forward to 2017, the first mainstream pump and discovery of Bitcoin resulted in newfound attention, and thus the age of the ICO appeared: a group of people unfamiliar with the core values had entered and began their attempts to heavily capitalise from the rise and rise of cryptocurrency. Announce a project, cash in, and disappear.
With this came both smart and dumb money; though there wasn't much difference between the two in regards to interest in the core values of cryptocurrency. For their main interest was generating more fiat currency, features were hardly an afterthought. We've been straying far from the core values for quite a while now, with many coins having CEOs and centralised parties and premines taking reign, but what I feel is significantly worse is this false belief that current DeFi is actually decentralised.
For the most part, the current state of decentralisation pertains to an ERC-20 token contract on Ethereum. These contracts are created by a central authority and held by a central authority. The hold premines under the excuse of funding the project, though we're really just being dumped on by a centralised authority. These central authorities claim their projects are a decentralised cryptocurrency, but they're incapable of being voted out.
With the current state of the world outside of cryptocurrency, there's a massive change in trust regarding centralised services: censorship, a rigged system in which those who run the game can change it at any moment. People are unhappy and desperately starting to wish for change. DeFi acts as that saviour, but it's no different.
I believe crypto holds the key to many positive changes to the world, but we're in for a strong kick in the face. DeFi can't rely on the same structure that's failing us elsewhere. I'd like for any community that claims to have a decentralised network to attempt to vote out the current leaders -- I mean, most don't even have such a feature to do so -- and see what happens when their power is questioned. Your token contract owners are not going to step-down willingly, they are not going to simply hand over millions of dollars of premined coins to a community fund actually held by a community that actively votes where such funds go. And they aren't going to build anything that could result in their removal.
Take into consideration Chainlink: a premined ERC token on Ethereum that claims to have decentralised nature in smart contracts and oracles. It's said that the time held more than half of the circulating supply, and there is factual evidence on-chain regarding the continuous dumping of millions in fiat on its investors. That sounds rather counter-intuitive, does it not? Let's dive a bit deeper into that:
- ERC token on Ethereum (not mineable), no fair distribution method
- Premined stake
- Has a CEO and centralised team, community can't vote on them
- Communiy has no say in development
Does this sound like decentralisation to you? Now consider the vast majority of projects being released, again on Ethereum, under the guise of decentralisation. This doesn't even begin to consider that said DeFi sits almost entirely on one single blockchain, which then serves as a single point of failure in all DeFi.
I believe the world of cryptocurrency and centralised finance is scheduled for a highly important, yet negative, event that displays the reality of this facade. I believe that such an event is the only way in which we can positively move forward into true decentralisation again, using independent blockchains in which communities truly take reign. No premines, no CEOs that scream about decentralisation but cannot be removed. I believe the way forward is user machines hosting networks similar to that of old PoS blockchains and Proof-of-Work systems that promote fair distribution and allocation of nodes. Decentralised exchanges similar to that of now-defunct CryptoBridge that thrive on the mutual understanding of true decentralisation and the importance of it.
Recently, we've all seen what happens with traditional finance, as a result of the $GME short-squeeze attempt. It's evident that the game is rigged, and the people have no say in what can be changed, it's rigged to the highest possible order, while we believe we have freedom to participate in anyway we see fit. The reality is centralisation.
And as a side note, I realise how much rambling takes place in this post, but these are some highly important thoughts I've had over the current state of crypto and where I believe it's heading, based on my own experience in crypto from 2012 to the present. And I hope that others read this and gain a larger understanding of what it is we're doing to this space that offers so much freedo to the people.