I don't know if we're there yet or not, but I remember last peak I started to here about crypto in my non crypto media feeds, aka comedy podcasts. I just saw my disc golf feeds talk about crypto. I think that's a strong signal.
The amount of institutional investment this round offer legitimacy and absolute scale of potential that can't be overlooked by anyone that's been paying attention.
Honestly, for the amount of forward thinking technologists that call this nook of the internet home, there is a ridiculous blind spot for cryptocurrency. It's actually ridiculous to me that such forward thinkers could be such luddites.
Will it take another decade before you realize we're there - or if not yet, where this is going?
But I am very disappointed in BTC and ETH. BTC did not become “A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System,” and we haven’t seen the explosion of uses-cases I hoped to see from ETH (like tokenization and trading of real-world assets). There’s a ton of froth and solutionism in this space, which is OK, but it also understandably puts off a lot of people who see it as a scam-ridden wasteland.
That’s to say nothing of the Tether black swan to come.
For ETH to trade real-world assets it needs everything else that the real world already provides: laws, courts, verification systems. Hell, it actually needs that even for digital systems.
This is why, try as people might (in over a decade) they have yet to achieve literally anything that isn't a currency with it.
You can represent them, but that's about it.
For Ethereum contracts to be enforceable in the real world (and even in the digital world) you need significantly more than just representation.
Black swan refer to unexpected events, right?
I understand that people are disappointed by this thus seeing the idea of BTC as a whole as a "failure", but given the fundamental properties of the system (finite supply, distributed network) it was never possible for BTC to become a currency used widely in everyday high volume transactions. Impossible.
Hal Finney even recognized this in early discussions predicting BTC wouldn't be used in high volume but more likely as a reserve asset, which BTC can absolutely be. Functioning as a digital gold, despite people's aversion or annoyance at this concept. Acting in concert w/ other payment methods or fiat currencies used for payments, taxes, commerce, transactions. A store of value to complement inevitable debasement or dilution of uncapped supplied fiat.
And that's fine, because the beauty of satoshi releasing it as open source spawned an entire ecosystem of ideas and implementations, so while his 'baby' may not be what he envisioned the basic idea and problems solved live on through evolution.
It certainly has when you consider that by cash Satoshi meant cash as a bearer instrument.
Unlike a federal reserve note—a piece of paper—that represented the thing that’s valuable—gold, bitcoin itself is the thing of value.
Monero is the 'ideological' best cryptocurrency in my opinion, and I've hedged my bets across a handful of coins that I think at least offer something valuable to the future space.
Bitcoin has the first mover advantage and although bastardized into a 'gold like store of value' completely detached from its original use case I'd still want to own a decent amount because why fight momentum.
I agree with everything you say (wild west token scams, tether backing and sketchy accounting) but I think there is too much benefit at the core for one to disregard the entire space. The cream will rise to the top.