The year is 2040, you wake up inside your VR pod and almost instantly hear *DING* *DING*. You look up to see a notification, “good morning, you have received 15 $wake coins”. You get out of your pod to go and make some coffee and just before you can start the machine, *DING* “congratulations, you have completed 15 steps, you have received 15 $walk coins”. Not a bad start to the day.

You get your coffee and choose one insect from your fine selection of bugs for breakfast. As your sipping your coffee and nibbling on your bugs, you scroll through your twitter feed to catch up with what happened while you were asleep.

“LOOL, gud tweet” you reply to an 0xgodking shitpost. Almost instantly you hear it. *DING* “you have received 20 $tweet coins for your first post of the day.”.  You finish up your breakfast as you accumulate $tweet coins for your morning of likes, RTs, and tweets, but just as your about to go about the rest of your day you get another notification. Yup you guessed it, “you have received 30 $eat coins for your breakfast this morning”.

You go for a shower and boom you receive $clean coin, you brush your teeth and boom, take a healthy dose of $tooth coin, you go for a run and boom, you receive more $walk coins. You then get back home, get into your pod and begin your days work.

It’s now lunchtime so you know what that means, some more $eat coins. Oh and you can’t forget the $watch coins you get for the TV show or youtuber you watched while you were eating. It’s now the end of your work day, you’re mentally drained and want to take the edge off, you realize you got no girl and rub one out, boom $wank coins straight into your wallet. Just before you’re about to sleep, you smoke a nice joint, get dropped some $smoke coins and call it a day.

How tf did we get here?

We’re all well aware of the potential of crypto. We know the revolutionary potential that blockchains have otherwise most of us wouldn’t be here today. While there are many things to be optimistic about in this space, I feel like most of what has hit the surface or at least won the attention game has just been a pile of nonsense.

It feels forced. Most VCs don’t give a shit and will fund anything that gets them paid, most developers are out ideas and have somewhat lost their innovativeness because it’s so easy to get funded, and us plebs just want one last pump to make it all back and we promise to sell.

This lack of ingenuity has caused mass saturation which primarily stems from attention truly becoming the most important and scarce resource in crypto. It’s reached the point to where creating any meaningful and helpful product has been abandoned and we have reached the stage of lets just pay people to do literally any regular task and that’s how we onboard them. We make the apps more retail friendly (only good thing to come out of this btw) and the chains more centralised, and we just send people money for walking, eating, pissing, shitting, smiling, talking, and breathing, we call it web3 and we call it a day.

It all boil downs to the simple of question of why? Are these things necessary? What’s purpose of having a hyper-financialized world where you pay people for the most menial tasks?

Let’s Rewind

While everyone in this space uses first principles thinking as somewhat of a buzzword, I feel like we really do need to get back to basics and break things down to its core.

This entire industry was born on the back of a financial crisis with the purpose of creating an alternate financial system because the traditional system lacked any form of transparency and put a lot of trust in the hands of a few corrupt individuals. Blockchains gave us a byzantine fault tolerant system, a system where millions of people can permissionlessly transact in a decentralized setting without the need for any trusted intermediaries. It provides a superior form of digital ownership and gives control back to the individual. Empowering the individual has always been the core ethos of this industry.

Upon this basic foundation you have things like p2p currencies, DeFi, NFTs and other things built which all have their own merits. But on this endless goose chase to create the next most outrageous ponzi so everyone can get their cut of the pie, we have ended up here. A space where we try to hyper-financialize everything due to a lack of care and intellect. As the space developed, the incentive structures that developed along with it are what created the perfect storm for this environment.

So where to from here?

You’ve probably heard this before, sometimes you need to take one step back to go two steps forward and this saying is most apt for where we are with crypto right now. There needs to be a purge of excess. We need to bring it back to basics and focus on the core properties of what make blockchains powerful and build off of those. Things that genuinely solve problems and make a difference in peoples lives.

If you want to get into the details and ask me what this would really look like? Then frankly, I have no idea, I’m just the substackooor who writes about the cool shit that people smarter than me build. Recently it seems like a lot of the smart people have disappeared but I’m hopeful that over the coming months we’ll see some cool things get built. The froth is settling and the real builders are probably moving silence.

Hopefully, I can look at this article a year from now and see that some meaningful progress has been made, if not, then oh well, I will be right there with y’all on the casino floor, buying worthless shekels until we’ve made enough money to move on to working on better things in life.

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