A lot of people think on much too small of a scale. This isn't just another investment, it has a very real possibility to completely replace the current financial system. If we can play our cards right, investing in and educating people on projects that are based on values like true decentralization, rather than just chasing short term profits, then maybe we've got a chance to avoid the ridiculous wealth disparity and environmental collapse that the legacy economy is barreling us towards.
If you want to see how it could play out there's a great novel by Kim Stanley Robinson called Ministry for the Future. In it one of the key components in saving the biosphere from global warming is a complete overhaul of the financial world through a crypto currency called Carbon Coin. It basically replaces the legacy financial world through just being a more reliable investment than anything else, money flows into it and the central banks, despite years of resistance eventually have pretty much no option but to adopt it.
By far the biggest segment of the global economy is referred to under the umbrella of 'Derivatives' and is estimated to be worth in the order of $550 trillion globally. Everything else, from money in your pocket, invested in bank accounts, real estate, debt, everything amounts to about $350 trillion, but disregard all that for a minute and lets just look at derivatives. The crypto equivalent to this market sector is DeFi: liquidity pools on UniSwap, yield farming on SushiSwap, put and call options on Opyn, perpetuals on dYdX, synthetic assets on Synthetix etc. etc. The total value of DeFi has grown to about $200 billion today. If it's growth continues it will be worth more than all tangible currency - coins and notes - in the entire world in a year or two. If it's increases continue then by 2030 it could be worth more than the 'everything except derivatives' section of the current global economy and in the same order of magnitude as fiat world derivatives.
While I don't think that timescale is necessarily realistic I do think that if investors see the returns that are possible in DeFi, the innovative products available and the permissionless, frictionless way value can move around it's in no way implausible to see really huge amounts of money flow into the system. Once governments and tax authorities realize that every transaction can be tracked across the blockchain I think a lot of their strongest objections will fade away, especially once they also realize that there's no real way to stop dApps running on a truly decentralized blockchain.
At some point in the movement of wealth from the legacy financial world we'll cross a threshold whereby crypto has more economic power than the fiat system. If we've built it well enough to resist control by banks and governments (i.e. held fast to the values of decentralization etc) I can envision steps whereby public goods funding from blockchain based DAOs funds more infrastructure than taxes, quadratic voting on issues you care about replaces representative democracy with a more direct version, blockchain based IDs replace passports for travel, supply chain verification running on rollups coordinates global trade etc etc. And then, as if by magic, the legacy powers will just slowly be rendered obsolete.
Back to the novel, because Carbon Coin runs on a blockchain it kills the concept of tax havens, allows the tracking of wealth and leads to social pressure for companies to decrease the gap between lowest and highest earners to something resembling the US navy (where admirals only earn 8x that of new recruits). With money now all blockchain based many countries use the tech to instigate Universal Basic Income, something that people are slowly starting to realize is going to be a necessity in world where we need to shut down huge industries like fossil fuel extraction. Not everywhere will be able to afford to provide UBI, and even among those receiving it presumably a lot of people will still want to do something productive - luckily the whole basis of the Carbon Coin is carbon capture, so one way anyone on the planet can earn it is planting trees, meaning even the poorest people can earn some and there is so much incentive to capture more carbon that we avert the worst case scenario of climate change.
It's basically my ideal 'what it means if we win' scenario!
I'm not really in crypto to get rich, I'm here because that's the future I want. I want a decentralized economy and a society that is capable of coordinating sufficiently to survive the global threat we're facing, because without that then everything else you might want to acquire is going to be worthless. There's a long way to go before we get there, and there's plenty of hurdles on the road ahead, but I believe there's at least a possibility of bringing it about. Well if you want to keep going down the rabbit hole I'd also recommend the Bankless podcast episode on Moloch:
Kevin Owocki and others are currently focused on this, with the recently started Green Pill project. There's lots of other interesting people in the community building towards this bigger goal, Karl Floersch of Optimism is worth listening to if you ever hear him on an interview and their rollup is planning to use the transaction fees/MEV generated as a method of funding Public Goods; Rune from Maker is advocating that they move their project (the second biggest in DeFi - https://defillama.com/) towards 'clean money'; the Proof of Humanity team are already operating a UBI scheme as well as the Sybil resistance advances that they have developed; Klima DAO has recently passed 16,000,000 tons worth of carbon credits locked; and of course anyone working on quadratic voting, funding public goods etc at Gitcoin is building the tools that this solarpunk future will need.
This is the real promise of crypto, it's a real chance to change the way civilization functions, giving us at least a shot at avoiding the Great Filter.
