This is not your fathers Buick/Cryptocurrency movement.
The cryptocurrency society is growing, adding new members and it is changing.
As I replied to a comment to one of my posts I realized that cryptocurrency is evolving, but so is it’s community.
The mass adoption that Bitcoiners spoke about 12 years ago is happening, but not the way they thought it would happen.
But isn’t that life?!
The Vision
I think the original vision was that everyone who became interested in cryptocurrency would adopt the ideas of being self-sovereign and having a Bitcoin-Bank in your pocket.
This vision included originally everyone being a Bitcoin miner, and then with the development of the Ethereum community everyone being a Ethereum miner.
This included everyone creating their own cryptocurrency wallet, which held their cryptocurrency, which was protected by their own keys.
‘Ethereum especially has a huge community of people who are devoted to adopting the cryptocurrency Ethos, and it’s newest offshoot decentralized finance, which literally took the world by storm, growing 1000% in one year.
Unfortunately something happened.
That something is what I call the beginnings of the much anticipated and desired Mass Adoption.
But it is bringing something with it which I think was not anticipated by the founding members; new ideas and new ethos/ethics.
The reality
In my view the beginnings of mass adoption were jumpstarted by decentralized finance and NFTs.
The literal cryptocurrency gold rush brought thousands of new people into cryptocurrency, as thousands of people became semi crypto literate seeking to earn high yields and make their fortune.
But as these thousands of people opened accounts on Coinbase, Binance, Kraken and others, they brought with them a desire for wealth, but not necessarily a desire for knowledge.
I think that many wanted to learn only enough to make money.
They were not interested in the beauty of decentralized distributed networks, the immutability of the open public blockchain or the beautiful irony of taking something like cryptography, which literally means to obscure and hide from view, and make something called a transparent, open blockchain.
These are wonderful things, but I don’t think the majority of people entering cryptocurrency for DeFi and NFTs really wanted to devote lots of time to understanding these things.
There we’re fortunes made, and stories of wide success were common.
But also we’re stories of thefts and scams.
Plus the growth of centralized exchanges, centralized investment projects and lots of bridges, quickly followed by the hacking or robbery of bridges and the failure of centralize investment opportunities.
The masses who joined didn’t want to learn how to build a crypto bank in their pocket, protected by cryptographic security.
They wanted something familiar, whose use required no new knowledge.
And they got what they wanted, the rise of Centralized Exchanges and the size of the fortunes built by the creators of centralized exchanges like Binance, Coinbase and FTX is legendary, and runs into the billions of dollars.
This is the paradox of mass adoption
The paradox
Yes instead of millions of people creating their own wallets, protected by their own private keys, they opted to store their money on exchanges, in someone else’s wallet.
Instead of learning how to use a browser based wallet like MetaMask, and interact with decentralized exchanges like Uniswap, or decentralized investment projects like the MakerDao or Staking and Yield Farms like Cubfinance or Polycub, new investors chose BitConnect, Terra Luna, 3 Arrows Capitol, FTX and other centralized, opaque projects.
The resulting scams rocked cryptocurrency, investors lost billions and cryptocurrency has become know as a den of thieves.
Ease of use won over safety, security and transparency.
I believe because it was easy.
Yes, the Leofinance Mantra since the SteemLeo days on Steemit, Ease of Use is the Ultimate Killer App.
And this has created a cryptocurrency society different from what the original Bitcoiners envisioned.
This one isn’t dependent on the learning of new ideas, adoption of disruptive technology and becoming self sovereign.
This crypto community is dominated by quick profits, lack of understanding and knowledge, a vacuum filled mostly with the desire to get rich with the least amount of work and understanding of the technology.
This is the Paradox of Mass adoption: the easier you make it to join, and the less you have to understand about how things work, to make or your and/or have fun, the more people will join.
This is also the path to financial success, a service oriented economy where ease of use combined with security is the new Killer App
This is the Paradox of Mass Adoption, and it is the reason for Hive’s slow adoption.
My new Manntra: To the easy, go the spoils or large communities.
What do you think?
Do you agree or disagree? Tell me in the comments.
