I was checking out the Xio Network Telegram group, a community driven crypto startup incubator that has a pretty interesting “social incentive” where the community gets to meaningfully contribute to topics and discussions on Xio Social media channels and get rewarded tokens. If you guys are interested in the project go check it out, I have my personal opinion about it so I won't hype or fud the project. Do your research about it and if you like it stick around. But anyways, the topic the community discussed was:
What is normal in crypto right now that looking back in a decade will seem absolutely pre-historic?
To answer this question, I had to ask myself another one...
What should happen in crypto a decade from now on?
Regulation. One of the biggest technologies humans have developed is the government. It protects us from enslavement, violence, lack of quality control in our food chains, and scams to name a few. Why there's so many pyramid schemes and crypto scams pumping and dumping all the time is because there's no regulation in the crypto space and for the industry to be regulated, governments around the world need to adopt blockchain technology as a radical structural change within their processes. If we can have transparent governments, we can have transparency across all industries not just blockchain/crypto. The reason why this might be extremely difficult is because current governments are corrupted. Corruption is fueled by selfishness and corruption is the cancer of society and we often associate corruption with just politicians or people in power but in reality we are all corrupted (selfish), some more than others as well. We need more conscious individuals, but that's so difficult in an unconscious society and the government could let us evolve as a collective and therefore help us evolve individually much better, if only they could take blockchain/crypto more seriously. This needs to happen from the most advanced first world countries, to the rest of the world. Of course, corruption is a deeper topic to discuss but this could be considered the gist of it.
In my opinion this is a real issue to address, that if we solve, it can lead us to really see significant changes in a decade not only in crypto but in the world. In the end, radical structural changes are needed once society halts progress and actually starts going backwards like modern times but this happens all the time. Radical changes have always happened throughout human history. If you could ask someone from 200, 500 or 1000 years ago how they see the world now, they probably would be in shock, you wouldn't imagine what it is to live in the 21st Century, but to us, the 21st Century is as normal as ordering fast food on Uber Eats. We take for granted what we have in our current times, and we also settle with current problems because “they have always existed” “nothing would change”.
A persistent problem in humanity has been corruption and has been dealt with in different ways. To deal with corruption in modern times, we need transparent governments. Corruption has nations completely backwards and blockchain technology is that chance to get us back on track. Corrupted governments won't accept blockchain technology as a radical change. There's going to be “buts” and “ifs” and acceptance will only happen as long as is convenient. I'm not sure if this would take us far in the long run.
I think is reasonable to say that the main reason governments haven't been all up for regulation is that, the technology is very recent, they can't scale it to the point of nation wide usage. But, don't you think that it should be in governments best interest to fund such technology to speed up scalability and adoption? Maybe governments aren't ready to let go from old habits? Again, maybe there's some that are ready to do just that because the less corrupted the government is, the more likely they will adopt the technology.
So coming back to the question, what will look pre-historic in a decade from now, I think of course lots of technical issues will be addressed, Web 3.0 wallets like Metamask and Scatter are definitely getting a more frictionless user experience, mining might be a think of the past, scalability issues will be solved, new monetary policies could be imagined, new consensus mechanisms, different asset classes, etc. You might think, well what has really happened since Bitcoin inception? A decade from 2009, and we are still facing the same problems, market manipulation, price suppression, scams, hype, etc. The same problems we see right now, even after a decade since the creation of Bitcoin, might still be a problem in a decade from now. Technologically wise, the industry has definitely changed. But the aspect of regulation its still underdeveloped. Without this as a priority, we might not see impactful progress in the blockchain space anytime soon.