Without a doubt, we're part of some amazing new movement using new technologies to potentially build something that's important for the future.

That said, I sometimes find myself wondering what exactly is happening here!

When I say "here," I don't just mean as part of the Hive or Inleo ecosystem, I mean as part of the greater Cryptosphere.

Call me old fashioned, but when I learned about business and starting some kind of project the core notion was always that there had to be a plan to provide some kind of value that could be marketed to the world in exchange for something tangible. And maybe it didn't even have to be tangible in the case of services, because services can also have value.

Of course, crypto is a funny fish. On one hand, it calls itself a currency which means it essentially exempts itself from having a business plan per se. Think about it: U.S. dollars, or EUR, or Japanese yen don't have a "business plan," they are currency; a medium of exchange. People use them for something that likely has a plan.

On the other hand, crypto projects hold themselves forth to be business-like and to set about solving some kind of problem. In other words, there is allegedly a value proposition or some reason that gives us a rationale for putting our hard earned fiat into this brave new frontier.

The thing that bugs me — having now been part of this circus for 10 years or slightly more — is that so much of the Cryptosphere seems to walk this very fine line between "money for nothing" and being part of an actual business proposition.

To continue the fiat example for a moment there are definitely some people who just hold U.S. dollars as ”a thing” and as the end of their plan, but for the vast majority of people with some kind of investment or business interest it's not the having of the US dollars that matters it's what you do with them to create more of them that lies at the heart of their motivation.

In the vast majority of crypto circles it's this ”doing” part that becomes terribly ambiguous, at least from my vantage point.

Where is the actual business plan? Moreover, among those who purport to have a business plan, how often do they ”get lost” in the excitement of simply having the token versus actually executing the business plan that subsequently encourages people to throw more tokens at them? Is there even a plan to generate revenue? Or is it all pure speculation, completely devoid of tangible value?

I struggle to get past the uneasy subtext that having a blockchain and a token somehow exempts people from actually making their projects profitable and/or viable.

I think back to a long time ago when there was some talk about people very easily being able to create a crypto token to support their personal brand. This was particularly something I came across in the context of social media and social media influencers.

Every time I read about this approach I couldn't help but think that it was dominated heavily by people who had dollar signs spinning in their eyeballs, while few people were actually willing to step up and discover just how much social pull they did (not) have, as they discovered that their dollar-a-token offering might only be worth a fraction of a cent.

Web 3.0 not withstanding, it brings us back to the very roots of how commerce works. Invariably any marketplace — whether it is a tangible product or an intangible service — is centered around the idea that there is an exchange of something for something. You can't just create something out of thin air and expect it to have value unless it provides some value to somebody.

Sure, I could create CAT tokens tomorrow (there actually is already a cat token on hive engine so I couldn't, technically speaking!) and expect people to make me rich, but I just don't see how that's going to happen unless I'm prepared to offer some sort of value in exchange for these cat tokens. And whether you like it or not, the elephant in the room that the Cryptosphere often overlooks is that that value can't just consist of me being willing to hand you more cat tokens at some time in the future. There has to be some sort of value attached to the cat tokens or they actually don't have any value.

And so, we run into the risk of ending up with the crypto equivalent of Zimbabwean dollars.

One of my personal curiosities

Maybe I'm reading the whole situation wrong, but there is a uncomfortable subtext I keep running into in the world of crypto that by having crypto we somehow exempt ourselves from actually having viable and sustainable business sense in what we're doing.

It sounds a little like the early Internet in in which lots of people believed that "We have a web site!" was sufficient reason to draw investment dollars... three decades later we're saying "We're on the blockchain!" and that's supposed to excite people, with no further explanation.

Unlike many projects, we take something like Inleo or Hive, and there actually is a value proposition ranging from our social platforms, to exchange facilities, to a number of games and beyond, but most ventures don't have that.

Meanwhile, the irony in all of this is that so many of these projects that don't have anything but AIR are the ones with skyrocketing trajectories while the projects where the more solid fundamentals and actual business plans are the ones that struggle to get much traction, from a financial perspective.

Is this telling us that crypto actually isn't the solution to anything other than feeding people's gambling addictions? Whatever happened to "changing the world and banking the unbanked," and to having decentralized currencies that everybody everywhere could use?

Color me cynical, but I am growing increasingly weary and increasingly ready to see something tangible rather than just an endless cloud of hype and hopium.

I want "Bitcoin Pizza" as a functional reality, not just a curiosity!

Thanks for coming to visit, and do leave a comment if you feel so inclined!

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