I haven't been in crypto since the early days. But in my opinion, we can distinguish three periods in the lifetime of crypto already:
- the idealistic period
- the romantic period
- the pragmatic period
There are interferences between the 3 periods, so it's not a clear separation, but this is how I'd categorize them:
1. The Idealistic Period
This started with the whitepaper of bitcoin and probably ended with Mt. Gox's collapse and the following bear market.
During this period, we had practically only bitcoin and its forks, and the main narrative was crypto and blockchains as the growing alternative to the fiat system which showed its ugly face in the subprime mortgage house of cards collapse and the ensuing financial crisis of 2008-2009, bank bailouts, etc.
During the idealistic period, the crypto space was mostly left alone, so development could take place and the networks could strengthen.
2. The Romantic Period
The romantic period starts as the market recovers after the first bear market, and more people (less technical too) get in love with the space (and with the potential gains). It is also characterized by new types of protocols being invented, and a significant number of blockchains starting using them, creating a growing market for alt coins. Centralized exchanges also started to become a common thing.
This period likely ended when the focus shifted toward decentralized finance, no use case NFTs, and meme coins. Note that they are not all in the same category of products.
3. The Pragmatic Period
This period started when innovation mostly started focusing on the financial aspect, or on products that were dumbed down and easy to create in order to attract money quickly (memecoins, NFTs without use case in the previous cycle, maybe ICOs a cycle before, to some degree). In the latter case, the focus seems to have been on centralizing funds from the ones without information to the ones with information. Note that this is the opposite target of the one from the idealistic and even romantic period, where products were created to decentralize inflation.
Of the 3, the romantic guy looks the most silly, don't you think? The AI wasn't far off from the request though.
This period is also dominated by high involvement of Wall Street firms, the space being distorted with the help of certain regulators, and shifting the crypto world from an alternative to fiat system to a small helping wheel of the fiat system (for now).
Now the push is to make states and countries invest in crypto.
The best thing that comes out of this period so far is the decentralized finance, in my opinion, but it needs to get better to be useful to the masses. Also, involvement of tech or financial giants and governments give legitimacy to the space for the regular people who may otherwise be reluctant to use crypto. As a result, we may see crypto payments and tokenization used at large scale in the future, which may not have been possible through the efforts of the space as an alternative to the fiat system.
Conclusion
What could come after the pragmatic period? I think it could come the utilitarian period, where with positive regulations, with mass adoption and integration with AI (agents), we can finally see a push toward massive developments on building projects with significant utility to humankind, at scale. But maybe I'm an optimist here, because things have gotten from good to worse in many aspects.
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