Mainstream Crypto Means Mainstream Problems!

in #hive-15032928 days ago

Clearly, crypto is no longer a "free standing" proposition.

What I mean by that, is that — for a while — the Cryptosphere seemed to kind of walk its own walk and do its own thing as if it was its own economy.

But — as we saw again this morning — there was economic news here in the USA and it affected the legacy financial markets, but all the cryptos immediately followed suit and also took a nosedive.

Seems to me that we're reaching a point at which the very process by which we have been hoping that crypto would become "more mainstream" is now resulting in crypto making more mainstream movements.

Meaning, that they're no longer excepted living in their own world. Instead when things happen in the economy they also happen to crypto because more and more people are invested in crypto.

Of course looking at that from a logical standpoint and deducing what I just did here is not exactly rocket science!


Hive price today; screen shot from CMC

But it does raise the question of how "alternative" we can really consider ourselves to be, anymore.

Which just goes to show what perhaps has always been the case: you can't both be "special and unique" and "popular with everybody" at the same time.

Perhaps the most poignant example of this tends to happen with restaurants and retail stores. Example time:

You have some place that serves really great food or a store that's really unique and different and gains a lot of local popularity. Business is always going strong and these places are always busy. Then somebody gets the brilliant idea that this "thing" should be everywhere, so why not turn it into a franchise!

Whereas I can superficially see the logic behind this, the people who want to put the places everywhere kind of miss the fact that the very essence of what makes them so special is the fact that they are truly unique and not found everywhere.

Which is why what often happens to that great burger restaurant that suddenly becomes a franchise is that the burgers are not nearly what they once were. The truth is that the ambience, and the food team that spent 10 years putting together something that's "just so" can't be replicated on a mass scale.

Of course crypto is not exactly a restaurant or a retail store, but it is something that has the flexibility to go its own way in doing its own thing as long as there are not too many fingers in the pie.

And so, that mainly leaves us with the question whether Crypto going mainstream will ultimately result in crypto no longer being something that even resembles the crypto that was brought to the world with a great sense of hope and idealism, in the early going.

I suppose only time will tell!

Thanks for coming to visit, and do leave a comment if you feel so inclined! This is "social" media, after all, so it helps everyone when we make the effort to BE social with our fellow content creators!

=^..^=


Posted with proof of brain

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The macro factors would affect cryptocurrency the same way the fiat money is affected by rates of inflation. Things are getting more and more complicated and interdependent.

Yes, I'd say that interdependent is a good word to use here.

Good observation ! I think a key point is also that once something gets popular, the legacy money men move in and wreck it for everyone with their greed.

Patisserie Valerie was a good example of that; they once had a few cafes in London and they were amazing. Then they were bought out in 2006 by a venture capital company and rapidly expanded. Prices went up, quality went way down, and the company got loaded with debt to fund expansion. In 2019, significant accounting irregularities were uncovered and the company collapsed. Following a fraud trial at the High Court and a damning indictment of the auditors, a management buyout salvaged a few branches, but they're not what they once were.

Also; that second photo is one of your best ! Beautiful kitty ! 😁

"Money men" basically destroy everything they touch because their orientation is never "macro" and rarely long term.

On a personal level, I've seen this happen in various collectibles industries: Sports cards, coins, rare stamps, comic books... there's a sudden tipping point where they go from being hobbies to where someone gets the idea they could be investments, and suddenly the entire reason for owning them moves from hobbyist to money maker.

The collapse is invariable... the thing about "money making" is that people expect to cash out at some point, and the landslide begins. There are actually two groups of victims in the process: The investors who end up getting fleeced, and the hobbies themselves... which are decimated by the whole process.