@bfg
I had two relatively depressing revelations about our crypto space today 🚨 the second one is far scarier than the first one, so I'll articulate that 🙄
Why is this one scarier?
Because it defines whom we meet in this space and who's building here.
I am pretty sure that crypto now has the worst reputation it ever had - and on top of it there are other really appealing tech trends to go after.
That prevents pretty much everyone really smart (i.e. people with options) from wanting to build anything in crypto.
We tap ourselves on the back that we are still here. I mean some really smart and visionary people who started the crypto movement, like Vitalik and others, are still here but there are no net new really smart people coming because it's not a net addition to their career path.
If you show you work or worked on anything in crypto, aka "you are or were part of that scam and casino industry," it won't get you applause. It won't get you taps on the back. It will get you sideways looks.
Which means that if you like tech and are really smart, you go and work on in banking (sorry, we now call it stablecoins) or AI, or any other thing which is somehow related to AI.
And that is really sad. And it also is the biggest problem we now have. Only smart people with industry knowledge from outside of crypto can bring us to the next meta of building crypto rails which are actually useful for someone and something. It's not about philosophy any more it's about action.
When there are no new smart & knowledgable people flowing in and many are flowing out, we are never going to get there because we will be stuck here in cycle we see now - rehashing all the casino, gambling, betting, predicting versions of products we already had. And we'll slap a tokenomics on everything AI to make it incomprehensible to everyone outside crypto.
That's kind of a self-defeating cycle our damaged image leaves us with. We can also partly thanks for that the president who siphoned a couple of hundred million out of crypto by launching his own token - so go figure others followed suite and here we are again.