Earlier today, I went through the somewhat sad process of burning my CUB and POLYCUB so as to at least get the small airdrop "consolation prize" for having participated in CubDefi.
I suppose it's the norm in the Cryptosphere... you mostly lose in this industry, and those who succeed generally do so because their ONE really big winner more than offsets their NINE total (or near total) losses.
Ironically enough, it's a paradigm I am quite familiar with from the context of selling old postage stamps to collectors on eBay for over 25 years: You can't be attached to whether or not you make a significant profit on any one item, you have to simply go with the averages. In the paper collectibles market, you also sometimes end up with "moonshots," like one I had some 15 years ago where an old stamp from Hong Kong I paid a couple of bucks for at a fleamarket type setup realized $2,041 in an eBay auction!
But I digress.
Onwards...
I think I managed to navigate the (revised) burn process without incident, and hopefully I'll get my few additional LEO tokens after next Friday's weekly roundup.
I'll start by saying that the instructions for the burn process were laid out quite clearly and understandably in the @leofinance post about the token burn.
I took lots of paper notes and had a notepad document going as well and took it slowly.
Reading the comments on that post — and thinking about my own experience, once I was done — it's still not a simple and straightforward process, no matter how you turn it.
Crypto is not a simple proposition, period.
Before I go on, I want to state very clearly:
The following is NOT a LeoFinance/INLEO issue, it's a CRYPTO issue!
Getting back to the CUB/POLYCUB burn, the overall user experience is an extraordinarily convoluted and complex process that I sincerely doubt more than 5-10% of the average population could navigate their way through without some major handholding by an expert!
Now, if my words make you feel a bit of anger/frustration arising within you, let me point out that if you are reading this post, you're "too close to the problem" to make a call to the contrary. Chances are you've been part of the community for years and are quite familiar with crypto, wallets and Defi.
In this particular scenario, you have an "assumption of knowledge bias" that's far removed from what someone who's just testing the waters of this for the first time is experiencing! Which is a fancy way of saying that your perception that it's "easy" is skewed by your previous experience.
My point here is that we talk a lot about bringing more people into INLEO, and into HIVE, and into CRYPTO, in general... but I'm sorry to say, that's not going to happen unless some major progress is made in terms of usability and ease of use in the overall user experience.
Whatever we might like to think, none of this stuff is exactly "easy" to use, by modern web standards.
Sure, we can talk about the benefits of Web 3.0, and the potential of crypto as a game changer, and the value of decentralization, and the rewards and ownership of creator content till we're blue in the face — and these are all valid points — but until we basically make all this stuff basic "plug and play" level of ease, that mass adoption is just not going to happen!
Ewwww... My MOM is Online!
Right now, the Cryptosphere is teetering on that same edge the Internet was at in its early days where the early adopters really wanted their "toy" to hit the big time, but at the same time harbored a sort of latent and covert arrogance over the system... a sort of unspoken "If you're not smart enough to figure this out, we don't WANT you here!" attitude.
Yeah, I get it... but such thoughts — even if unsaid — essentially constitute getting in our own way of mass adoption.
If we dial back time to the mid-to-late 1990's, Steve Case and his vision for AOL ended up "winning the Internet," taking it from "niche" to tens of millions of users.
The early Internet adopters — mostly nerds, scientists, people in the educational field and developers — HATED AOL with a passion, while the "masses" loved it and jumped on it with a similar passion for ONE major reason:
It Was Easy to Use!
AOL was no great shakes from a technology standpoint... but it gave the next wave of web users a nice, safe, intuitive, easy to use walled "sandbox" of sorts to be online and get basic email, and look at newsgroups, and participate in forums and chats and even surf web sites a little.
Suddenly "your mom" was online, trading recipes and emailing photos of the kids.
So here's something both ironic and rather synchronistic for you:
One of the things AOL "got right" in the early running was email addresses.
You could be "BillyBob@aol.com" instead of "user1345.65535.235@cs.com." Which would you rather remember and share with your friends?
Oh, Guess What?
Hive has crypto wallet addresses that are just simple 16-digit alphanumeric user chosen names, rather than an unintelligible 40-character string of randomness nobody can remember!
Meaning... Hive/INLEO are already on the way to improved user experiences, we just need to exploit that advantage a little better! Can we do that?
I sure hope we do!
In the meantime, I'm going to sit my non-technical rear end down and hope that my small airdrop of LEO tokens will help me make this next #LPUD possible!
=..=
Curator Cat, April 02, 2024
