Whenever the crypto markets get a bit shaky we end up with the inevitable chorus of people saying ”I'm getting out of crypto!”
To be honest, I'm starting to develop some reservations of my own. However these reservations have little to do with the market prices being down and a lot more to do with the general development and direction of the crypto industry as a whole.
As our own Hive token is playing around with three-year lows at a time when Bitcoin has recently been playing with all time highs... and while that's a bit depressing, what really gives me cause for reservation is the overall notion that this industry is becoming more and more "gimmicky."
Resorting to gimmicks tends to be an indication that a thing has/may have reached the point where the fundamentals are going nowhere and instead people are resorting to — to borrow an old entertainment industry term — "jump the shark" in order to save itself.
Maybe I'm old fashioned, but "giving away free stuff" is not a business model. Well... it might be a business model if you're a promotional company that gathers free stuff to give away and get paid by the manufacturers who give you the free stuff — which are usually sample sizes of the real thing that costs money. Simply giving away free stuff has no sustainable longevity.
The crypto industry seems to give away more and more free stuff with every passing month...
I look around me and I consider the original promises of cryptocurrency as an actual form of payment and I look at what we have now. Then I look at the ratio of projects in this industry that actually have a business model that includes revenue generation in some fashion relative to the number of projects that simply exist for their own sake and they only gain attention by giving away large volumes of their token in either airdrops or free giveaways while the number of actual business plans out there is minuscule.
There's a certain irony in this that is not entirely lost on me, in that so much of the philosophical energy behind crypto is offered by people whose entire premise is that we "need" crypto because traditional fiat money is about printing presses (in the form of endless airdrops) just running and the currency being inflationary and becoming worth less and less.
And yet, in the course of the approximate decade I've been involved in this circus, the entire approach has radically shifted from that original premise to being yet another way for people to somehow get "money for nothing."
I'm not trying to tar the entire industry with that same brush, however I am beginning to think (and hence my hesitations) that the entire industry needs a bit of an image makeover in order for it to have a chance of being in any way relevant and sustainable in the long term.
Consider something like "Hamster Kombat," the latest viral phenomenon of the crypto world. Somehow, a small Telegram based mini game has managed to attract 300 MILLION users.
What interests me about it isn't so much the fact that hundreds of millions of people are involved, as the fact of where the most potential revenue for the game founders is coming from.
Consider that it isn't the crypto activity that is earning an income, it's the fact that their (alleged) 300 million users have resulted in a YouTube channel with more than 35 million subscribers, and by most metrics the ad revenue generated by the number of views coming from those subscribers amounts to something on the order of US $50,000-$100,000 a day.
That's definitely not chump change but it comes from conventional ad revenues from a legacy economy project that pays in fiat. The crypto isn’t generating all that money, the legacy economy is. The crypto seems more like "window dressing."
To be fair, I'm sure there are some dedicated fans who are parting with their TON tokens to buy game boosts and advantages... but the entire premise hangs on the idea that game play will earn you free airdrop tokens, and we're right back at "money for nothing."
And no, I'm not really getting out of crypto, but I'm limiting my exposure to anything that isn't actually trying to be a crypto-based business, with some sort of direction.
Web 3.0 might be amazing, but we'd do well to remember that tokens aren't the product, merely the vehicle to drive the product... whatever it might be!
Thanks for stopping by, and have a great remainder of your week!
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Created at 2024-09-04 23:59 PDT
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