As a teenager did you ever get passionate about a favorite band or singer? You must remember that feeling of wanting to tell the whole world how wonderful they are. But then when the world started listening too, you experienced that slight feeling of disappointment: Now that all the grey and ordinary people have tuned into your passion, and suddenly you don't feel so passionate! Does this strike a chord? Last year's exceptional becomes this year's normal, and probably next year's bland.
Facebook used to be hip. No, really.
For example, do you remember when Facebook was hip? It wasn’t so long ago, but of course now Facebook is only for grandparents and is being deserted by young people in their millions. In fact, Facebook isn't even being deserted by the youngest: they were never on it in the first place. It's now irrelevant and is just being ignored. We have a somewhat similar situation in the crypto world: Five minutes ago we were all passionate revolutionaries carving out an entirely new niche market. It was like the Klondike in the Gold Rush days and we were the rough and tough desperados who went places everyone else feared to go.
As crypto blogger Avaer Kazmer reflects, “It was a really exciting time to be a part of the community. Many of us spent long nights imagining how we would transform the meaning of value, the meaning of work, maybe even the meaning of democracy with a new kind of consensus protocol… It was pretty crazy, but it was worth a shot, because the rest of the financial world looked bleak. Bitcoin was nothing more than a backlash against a world that ran on corruption, greed, and the worst parts of human nature. I miss those days.”
What happens when the suits arrive?
That was then and this is now, because the suits started arriving, like sharks attracted to blood in the water, and how could they not? Too much currency was changing hands for the corporations to ignore. At first they simply wanted to shut crypto down, and to regulate it out of existence. Witness banks across the world whispering in the ears of governments about the dangers of decentralized transactions. If they couldn't get a piece of the action then they’d rather close down the action all together. The Tech Giants acted in a similar fashion, instituting crypto advertising bans - on the face of it to ‘protect consumers’.
Of course what all these large corporations were really doing was marking time while they figured out how to maximize their slice of crypto. Now they're moving into the markets that they recently were so suspicious of, with a list of security tokens in hand, and just like your tragically unhip uncles they are announcing that they just love your favorite band. When your favorite band becomes suddenly bland it's sort of OK, because you know there’ll be another band along soon that is musically more adventurous and has an even more wonderful image.
With crypto though - what happens when it becomes the property of the tragically unhip uncles in suits, and where will we turn for our next shot of passion?