> If you know anyone into crypto you would know they talk about it non stop.
Not really. There are a lot of people holding, mining, DCA'ing into projects they believe in who have no trouble at all keeping it to themselves.
Your remarks about gambling are similarly projecting a portion of the community onto the rest. Those traders who treat it as a speculative asset are gambling as you say, and tend to be obsessive in the way you describe, but you seem not to be aware of everyone who deals with crypto differently than you did.
There are a lot of crypto projects that people don't expect to moon, that effectively serve their purpose right now, and will just get better at it in the future. None of what you wrote is nearly as generally true as you made it out to be.
Yep, exactly. I've been working in crypto for 4 years and counting, still haven't purchased a single token as an investment. I don't like downside risk, I like to build product. We've weathered one bear market, we'll weather another.
Thankfully there's cool stuff in the ecosystem that isn't a scam, but it's not newsworthy, so it doesn't go viral.
One of the cool parts of crypto is that it enables new forms of social coordination that take place entirely within an online context. We haven't even scratched the surface of what could be possible with DAOs; the UIs and educational materials don't exist yet.
But given how online people are in general (and they're only likely to become more online in the future), it's natural they'll want digitally-native ways to organize themselves, represent ownership, qualify membership, etc.
The shift in concept required here is from viewing a token as "an investment" to viewing it as a form of legible social proof within its community context, which becomes more meaningful as communities grow beyond the "tipping point" where interpersonal proof (think webs-of-trust) is sufficient for coordination. NFTs (yes, they're still around!) are already serving this function for certain experimental communities (and even in less experimental ones, see POAPs).
In general, everything above is still in the experimental, live or die phase. We don't quite know where it's going. But it's pretty damn cool to watch if you're deeply invested in the internet as a medium (and as someone who "grew up online", I absolutely am).
I'm curious to dig into this a bit more. In general, I'm skeptical about those use cases.
* If it's a governance token system where more money == more power...well, I just don't think it's a good idea in general.
* If it's a system that tries to replicate the idea of one person/one vote, you have to have KYC (and re-KYC upon membership transfer) or it devolves into the first case. Then the entity doing KYC has centralized control over membership, so it seems like storing membership info on a ledger doesn't offer any benefits compared to just having a central membership database.
To address the latter case first: what you gain is standardization and interoperability, where the crypto toolbox acts as a protocol. Even if you're doing KYC in a centralized way, you can plug your token/DAO into any tool that supports it and use their interfaces. At least in theory. Good interfaces don't quite exist yet (it's being worked on). I'm sure there's already web2 tools out there, but the ideal web3 case is far lower friction, requiring no web hosting, deployment, trusted middlemen, etc. The proof of this will be in its success or failure, I'm still not sure how it'll play out.
Regarding the former case, of money and power... this one is a little harder. In theory, if you're a part of some community, and a very rich person wanted to fuck up or infiltrate your community by leveraging their wealth, they could probably figure out a way to do it, crypto or not. At least in this case, the existing community members stand to reap some sort of benefit from it, in the sense that a new whale's buy-in will increase the value of their existing holdings. Then they can all cash out and start a new thing someplace else. It has a similar form and moral valence as neighborhood gentrification (but without the racialized element).
I tend to think most communities will solve this by having some external aim of coordination that discourages people from just speculating (which makes sense given that social proof exists relative to the community in question), even if the balance of power is determined based on buy-in. But again, I don't really know how it will play out in practice, if more regular people will actually take up these tools for non-speculation reasons, etc.
Interesting. Do you have some resources or recommended reading you can suggest for crypto in the context of social coordination or these other shifts in concept you mentioned? I don't doubt there's interesting applications for some of this tech that have nothing do with the usual hype. I would be curious to read up on some of these developments.
To be completely honest--and I don't mean to sound mean--that doesn't seem very cool at all to me. That's a lot of words to say that with crypto you can own a token that signifies you're a part of a community. And that's the coolest thing you can think of. The iPhone is much cooler than that, I use it all day. And Steve Jobs didn't talk about it nearly as much before it started being used widely.
The potential is way beyond just "proof of membership", but that's the only tool that's currently out there and in active usage, as far as I know.
When I say coordination, I mean all sorts of collective decision-making and agency can take place using crypto as a medium, if someone has a vision and enough people are invested in making it happen, see: https://otherinter.net/research/squad-wealth/. Basically, if you need to get groups of people to align themselves and act in concert, and it's happening over the internet, crypto has the potential to make that happen. The technology is fundamentally social in nature, whereas an iPhone is fundamentally a personal object that happens to include some social tooling.
I don't know how it's going to look. Maybe groups will work together to purchase and maintain land. Maybe you'll see digital guilds or unions forming around creative niches. Regen (https://www.regen.network/) is working on communities for landowners who want to get carbon credits. It's really early. Maybe nothing will happen at all, and I'll look back on these posts with embarrassment. But it's exciting to work on projects building stuff that really doesn't exist yet, if only to see what happens.
(oh, and, people really aren't talking about this side of crypto at all. this is an entirely separate thing from bitcoin and defi)
I'm extremely skeptical that this silent majority exists because I don't see crypto being used for anything other than hodl-ing. Do you have indicators you can point to of cryptocurrency being used as a real currency?
Whether or not you think NFTs are stupid and totally worthless, there's a fairly extensive economy based around fine art NFTs where collectors (who view them more as consumption goods than investments) buy and sell in ETH. And despite wild fluctuations in ETH<>USD, people's mental accounting is generally denominated in ETH.
I'm unconvinced that most people who buy NFTs are doing it for non-gambling reasons. Where's the market in smart displays you can hook up to your wallet and show you your NFTs? Other than Twitter hexagons, are people doing anything with their NFTs?
I have seen very few people talking about the price of something in ETH without a parenthetical giving the current USD value.
As I said, I'm not trying to convince you that they aren't stupid and worthless here -- just that there's a flourishing and highly functioning ecosystem built around them, which couldn't really exist in any other context.
Also, there are plenty of smart display companies popping up. Check out Infinite Objects or Atomic Forms.
At the same time, I assume that most of the liquidity in the markets come from professionals and the people described in GP, whereas the casual retail/investors you describe tend to not keep their assets on orderbooks or in liquidity pools.
Not really. There are a lot of people holding, mining, DCA'ing into projects they believe in who have no trouble at all keeping it to themselves.
Your remarks about gambling are similarly projecting a portion of the community onto the rest. Those traders who treat it as a speculative asset are gambling as you say, and tend to be obsessive in the way you describe, but you seem not to be aware of everyone who deals with crypto differently than you did.
There are a lot of crypto projects that people don't expect to moon, that effectively serve their purpose right now, and will just get better at it in the future. None of what you wrote is nearly as generally true as you made it out to be.