I've been into Crypto for close to 10 years and I can't shake the feeling that the situation in the crypto world is not as dynamic as it has once been.
If in 2015, crypto was only known by very few, it's totally different today. I would say that almost everybody has heard about bitcoin and crypto at least once in their lives. However, the perception of what crypto was has also changed in this time frame.
Crypto in 2015 was a gateway to liberty
Among the people active at that time, crypto was a way to bypass fiat money, banks, intermediaries. It was a way to take things into our own hands. Everybody could send and get money from wherever on the planet thanks to wallets in a more or less anonymous way.
Crypto in 2025 is an investment vehicle
Today, I received a brochure of my bank telling me that I could now invest in crypto through the bank. This translates very well what crypto has become: a mere investment vehicle. The offer is big in meme-coins for people who want to speculate to rather traditional coins like bitcoin that promise an increase in value over time because of its deflationary nature.
In our days, most see crypto as a way to increase their worth. To do that, they tend to look at the price of the coins and they hope that they will be able to sell them more expansive than what they bought them for.
What about the crypto technology?
In 2015, what really attracted me to crypto was the fact that it was possible to transact monetary value almost without transaction costs. It would be perfect for online business or even offline business where with a phone coins could be swapped on the ledger. The technology seemed secure and fast. It is funny to see that 10 years later, we don't really have a wide adoption of this use case. Transaction fees for ETH and BTC went up consequently and no other coin could really fill the gap, probably also because of regulatory and financial reasons.
We have seen a lot of innovation in the blockchain world. We have seen ICO's, NFT's, games built on blockchains, social media built on blockchains and many other things. We have seen great tools like liquidity pools, DAO's or smart contracts but in general all these innovations haven't really had a breakthrough. Great things have come with blockchains but few have had a real impact on the economy in general.
The illusion of the magical internet money
One thing that I've learned in these 10 years is that I don't believe in the magical internet money that makes everybody rich. Nowadays, the crypto prices fluctuate in parallel to all the other investment assets. If Wall Street goes up, so does BTC and with BTC all the altcoins. Many projects have died and many projects were nothing else than scams. There is no such thing as magical internet money where everybody gets rich from a coin that is minted out of thin air.
The value of a coin follows the same laws than any other product. If the demand is higher than the supply, the coin goes up in value and it goes down if the demand is lower than the supply. By playing with the supply, it's possible to let tokens shine for a while but sooner or later things will balance out and tokens will lose their value if the demand is not growing.
What about the Crypto future?
As long as people consider crypto as investment vehicle, crypto will gain value when all the markets gain value as well. So crypto will do well when markets boom but they will do badly in recession.
I still believe however that crypto is more than it's value in USD. We have some great examples of chains that offer things that wouldn't be possible without crypto technology. Our mindsets are still too much working in the old schemes. We need to get out of the box. Thanks to crypto we could find new ways for people to work together. We could create new e-commerce solutions. We could create financial solutions to support people and communities. Crypto offers decentralized solutions where people could achieve goals as a community and not as individuals.
As long as our minds are set on getting a maximum of return from crypto, we won't go there however...
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Crypto has changed quite a bit and I agree that people are more accepting of it now. I haven't been in the space as long though but the technology is there. I just don't know if I am disillusioned a bit by all the meme or scams going on though.
It really saddens me to see all these obvious scams and hypes and people knowingly putting their money into it...
On the positive side, Bitcoin and others are now acceptable investments. They were illegal in many countries in 2015. Acceptance is the first step towards a good future.
!PIZZA
That's actually very true.
If I had known, I would have joined the crypto world earlier but I didn’t have people who could put me through
Crypto is the future and I’m glad I grabbed my opportunity by joining this decentralized platform Hive
It's nice you found the way to hive :-)
That's the biggest problem that we humans have from forever... We have one guy inventing a wheel, and for the next hundreds of years, we still don't use it because we don't understand the full potential...
We are using 10% of our brains, and in some way, we are using a maximum of 10% of crypto potential at the moment... I believe that will change, but to see that happening, we have to work on that... To promote, to search for new use cases, to implement things, to educate, etc.
I have the feeling in our days we are pretty stuck in thinking patterns and we can't think out of the box. However, I believe that this is necessary for us to be able to find new, innovative ways to use the full potential of crypto.
Bitcoin is headed to be the global reserve currency. This will constrain governments from over-spending like Gold did. It will prevent money being used as a weapon.
Bitcoin is still bringing freedom.
I hope we will get there and that we don't repeat the errors of the past. Bitcoin is definitely already providing some freedom in the fact that we have a real alternative to fiat currencies...
I would say that most of the cryptos released in the current cycle have been VC pump and dumps, so of course nothing has taken off. I also believe there is a big difference between crypto and Bitcoin, or at least mined coins. Without any cost to create tokens, of course it will be manipulated or not hold value over the long term.
Whilst people might be using Bitcoin as an investment vehicle, its true value is in that it is freedomtech, although NGU is an important factor too.
I really don't like these pump and dumps scheems. It will just require more regulations and more government and it doesn't create any value at all...
I know speaking for myself, I have lost the passion big time. I believed in this chain more than anything in my life, and while I had some great moments, at the end of the day, it never grew into what I thought it would.
Maybe it's because I'm just 'meh' about it all, but you are right, there was something incredible about those times a decade ago. Everything felt exciting, like we were really going to change the world with it all.
Hi man, thanks a lot for your comment! I hope you are fine.
I can totally relate to that. It's a bit the same for me as well. I think I have become more realist and I can smell the weak points of a project very quickly. Unfortunately, I smell these weak points in almost everything that comes out nowadays...
I still believe that crypto could change the world but I think that we also need a different mindset and other values. Otherwise we just do exactly the same things with crypto that we would do in the normal economy.
Good to hear from you man, always nice to catch up. Yeah I'm good, been working at my dream job since February, and it's allowed me to finally have no stress in my life after trying to rebuild CTP and bring crypto to the community lol
But yeah man, I think I was blinded here. Didn't wanna see the weak points, just kept smiling and praying that the whales would vote me if I was a good little soldier lol
There are definitely some nice ups when being employed and doing a job that you like. Being entrepreneur is not always easy and certainly not really stress free... I'm also an entrepreneur in real life and sometimes I dream of just doing a job where I don't have to worry about income, costs, customers and such...
Oh man, it's night and day. When it's good (being an entrepreneur) it's great. But when it's rough and you dont know where you next dollar will come from, it's stress lol
I did 25 years of that man, and the last 6-7 was torture trying to stay afloat. It was just time for me to tap out lol
You've done an excellent job of summarising all the crypto happenings. But the most accurate thing is that there is no magic internet money.
I think that after so long time in the crypto world, I tend to see the flaws of most projects and I can quickly see how they will evolve. Unfortunately, I get seldom high hopes about things nowadays lol
I'm afraid the big corporations have already invaded the cryptos, except for small decentralized islands.
Hmm I still think it's quite early - most of my family and friends don't have much knowledge about cryptos and are skeptical of them. They probably heard about "bitcoin" as a word before, but they probably don't know what it really is.
!LUV
The problem I see with crypto nowadays is that if you talk crypto with somebody, they will either tell you that they have invested in crypto or that they don't want to invest in crypto. 99.5% of the people have no idea about what is possible to do with crypto.
That's true. I think the more traditional investors are more familiar with BTC and ETH as another type of asset because of the ETFs, but might not know the infrastructure behind them like blockchain, wallets, tokenomics, etc.
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My crypto conviction has changed significantly over the past few years too. I now mainly only DCA into BTC and am skipping almost all alts.
I totally understand your strategy and I have to say it makes a lot of sense to do so...
Yeah, unfortunately the eyes crypto is looked at changed from a revolutionary technology and potential alternative by those who saw its potential (and magic internet money by others), and is now seen as an investment vehicle mainly. And that change will only become more predominant.
The investment side is becoming really mainstream now. Every person owning a swiss post account can now invest in crypto. But of course you don't get the keys...
Yeah, that was expected to come.
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One of the most significant things I have come to discover is the fact that this world evolve and changes as day passes by
World changes faster than it did before...
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I will really say one of the things I have actually noticed about crypto is the fact that it keeps evolving and evolving as day goes by