The above image was made by @amberjyang with Midjourney using the prompt 'sad cartoon bitcoin face all by itself on a playground.'
I bought my first bitcoin in 2014 and never looked back. Now, a decade later, I'm loving the emerging blockchain economy, but I'm growing impatient with the slow pace of this new economy's emergence. People have heard of bitcoin and to a lesser extent Ethereum, but no one knows about EOS, Hive, or the thousands of other good projects out there. Five years ago, it looked like crypto adoption was about to explode. It still looks like that today.
In my opinion, a combination of corporate stupidity and regulatory bumbling made the US unattractive to the tech companies that should've driven widespread adoption. The high profile scandals didn't help. And when exchange after exchange started kicking US residents out of their global markets, it did little to bring new people into the space. At this point, the pace of adoption is glacial.
There are lots of awesome people in crypto. I can't even count how many brilliant and creative people I've worked with in this world over the years. But there has always been a disconnect between this crowd and average people. The crypto people shout, 'look at the tech!' and everybody else responds, 'Zelle is better!'
It's also worth noting that most of the talent in the sector has been directed towards specialized financial products at the expense of more broadly appealing consumer products. This narrow focus reflects a larger effort to confine crypto to the world of finance while ignoring its much more far reaching potential. It has resulted in a small group of people obsessing about token price and investment potential while everyone else waits around for the tech to start solving problems they can relate to.
True, some good has come out of this narrow focus. Zero cost remittances. High yield savings accounts. DeFi mechanisms that do interesting things. But people aren't flocking to crypto for this stuff. They're sticking with the legacy economy and Big Tech, even though it's no longer in their economic interest to do so.
VCs are Not the Problem
Some crypto critics blame tech culture and venture capitalism for the sector's unspectacular adoption rates. But VCs are not the problem. They're just as disappointed with these adoption rates as the rest of us. The real problem, in my opinion, is that the culture of crypto has become fearful and confused in response to government overreach.
There are of course projects that shine in this darkness, with Hive and EOS at the top of the list. And no exchange does more for US residents than Coinbase. But even these successes are small potatoes compared with Facebook and Bank of America. Mainstream adoption won't happen until blockchain apps gain significantly more traction.
My own token project @rstory is tiny, yet I face many of the same challenges as any operator in the sector. I have to convince developers to work on my features. I have to convince people to use my product. And I have to abide by the law.
Yet unlike many startups, my project is tiny and relaxing. There are no financiers to please. There's no payroll to worry about. My token has a clear value basis and practical utility, so it doesn't look at all like a security to me, and I'm actively discouraging purchasing the token for investment purposes, which will hopefully keep the SEC off my back.
As for convincing people to use Rstory, the only thing that seems realistic is to walk them through the whole process of setting up a crypto wallet and then using this wallet to connect with blockchain apps like mine. If every company in the space likewise took responsibility for onboarding newbies, this space would be more heavily populated.
Read Free Mind Gazette on Substack
Read my novels:
- Small Gods of Time Travel is available as a web book on IPFS and as a 41 piece Tezos NFT collection on Objkt.
- The Paradise Anomaly is available in print via Blurb and for Kindle on Amazon.
- Psychic Avalanche is available in print via Blurb and for Kindle on Amazon.
- One Man Embassy is available in print via Blurb and for Kindle on Amazon.
- Flying Saucer Shenanigans is available in print via Blurb and for Kindle on Amazon.
- Rainbow Lullaby is available in print via Blurb and for Kindle on Amazon.
- The Ostermann Method is available in print via Blurb and for Kindle on Amazon.
- Blue Dragon Mississippi is available in print via Blurb and for Kindle on Amazon.
See my NFTs:
- Small Gods of Time Travel is a 41 piece Tezos NFT collection on Objkt that goes with my book by the same name.
- History and the Machine is a 20 piece Tezos NFT collection on Objkt based on my series of oil paintings of interesting people from history.
- Artifacts of Mind Control is a 15 piece Tezos NFT collection on Objkt based on declassified CIA documents from the MKULTRA program.
What a powerful line!! After reading your blog, I feel like the AI image is super fitting :) Also, I feel like you're one of the few people (I've seen at least) who talk about the values behind crypto and what it can do. Most of the stuff I hear about crypto are financial analyses, technical details, and crypto jargon that are important but not so easy to relate to for someone who is new. I think a lot of people don't really get that it's a collective empowerment tool. I love learning about crypto through you!
Thanks! I'm hoping to get more people talking about the social potential alongside the economic potential: )
The image is amazing!
Right?
One major regret I have is not keeping my key phrase. I bought some BTCs a few years ago and I didn’t really know the meaning of wallet phrase so I didn’t Kermit and I no longer have the access to that account
Sorry to hear that. My biggest crypto regret is selling the first bitcoin I bought to pay for a camping trip.