Crypto's Pubescent Identity Crisis

Your highest dreams now seemed too timid as you were boldly going beyond the feasible. Everything appeared to be kneeling in your presence in awe of what you had attained. And in that moment, you didn’t even consider the ground because you were now a god of the heavens--until the sun melted your wings and in an instant, everything seemed to fall apart. Maybe it was pride and greed; maybe it was curiosity and adventure; maybe it was conviction and confidence. Whatever it was that made us forget the ground, we obviously went too far with it and now we need to take a moment to recollect ourselves in the midst of this mess.

So, where do we go from here?

First, Where Even Are We?

It’s kind of hard to pinpoint where exactly we are. The cryptocurrency with the third-highest market cap has been unpegged and frozen, essentially trapping $74,000,000,000 in a crypto Ice Age. Bitcoin and Ethereum plummeted with the gravity of LUNA’s crash, and people lost everything because they had been told that if they were “brave” enough, they could make a killing. Now, our community is mobilizing to reach out to those same people with the Suicide Prevention Hotline because so many now feel hopeless.

I thought crypto was supposed to shelter the common-folk from being economically decimated by the ultra-wealthy gambling for the thrill of greed.

I thought crypto was supposed to shelter the common folk from being economically decimated by the ultra-wealthy gambling for the thrill of greed. This, certainly, cannot be what cryptocurrency’s dream evolved into. Yet here we are, at a place antithetical to the ideals the movement was founded upon.

I suppose the cryptosphere is in an adolescent phase now. Young and immature enough to lose sight of what matters in the long run, but old and big enough to cause serious damage. The adults of the financial world invited us to their table as we sought to grow beyond child’s play, and somehow or another a glass shattered and caused a panic that has us unsure about who we even are.

We need to face the truth: our movement is lost. But not all is lost…

Lost Together

Have you ever stopped to think about how easy it is to get lost in this world? Like physically lost. One might actually say that humanity began as lost among the wilderness of the world with only raw possibility (and lots of stuff that wanted to kill us). But we made our own way in a world that was stacked against us. And we succeeded…because we did it together.

The cryptocurrency movement may be lost right now, but at least there is a community that is still together, hoping for a better way forward. Now is the time to put our minds together to re-imagine the dream we all were drawn towards.

For my part, I wrote The Digital Universal Drachma: A Paradigm for a Global Private-Public Cryptocurrency a while before the “LUNAr eclipse,” but I think it is even more applicable and urgent to our current situation.

We need to stop looking for a new Satoshi to lead us out of this mess, and instead rely upon our own wits and conviction to reclaim the dream we promised to fulfill.

We need to stop looking for a new Satoshi to lead us out of this mess and instead rely upon our own wits and conviction to reclaim the dream we promised to fulfill. Let’s actually start discussing where we want to head in the coming era of crypto.

So, Who Are We Going to Be?

Leave your comments to start a discussion about where crypto has gone astray and how to revitalize the dream we all once had.