Here in the Cryptosphere, we seem to have a set of ideas/ideals that sometimes end up contradicting themselves, in some fashion.

We love decentralization, and the fact that crypto seems to be "independent," without evil overlords to control us. It feels like crypto occupies its own space somewhere, blazing its own path.

At the same time, we talk a lot about crypto becoming widely adopted and "going mainstream." We want everybody to use crypto and recognize its greatness. It's a game changer, the ultimate disruptive technology!

But how are these two ideas going to work, together?

Somehow, pretty much all life experience tells us that the larger a group (of pretty much ANYTHING) grows the more it will start to resemble the mean/median of that group.

Consider a small village with "progressive" ideas. Because it's small and everyone is plugged into what's going on and being accomplished, amazing changes and growth of innovation is possible.

But when you suddenly become a city of a million people, you end up with pretty much all the issues and problems large cities seem to have always faced, no matter how idealist the core fundamentals that started the village might have been.

What does this have to do with crypto?

Seems to me that the more mainstream crypto becomes, the more it will stop charting its own course, and the more it will become tied to the ups and downs of the mainstream economy. There comes a point where we can't sit around and declare that we are "different" anymore because we've become mainstream!

It seems to be the point at which idealism invariably breaks down.

Not because the ideas/products/services on offer are bad, but because your "sample size" has grown to a point where too many subgroups have different opinions and insist that their opinion is the one that must reign supreme.

In time, ever more compromises have to be made to help everything stay somewhat peaceful... and "the original idea" gradually becomes more and more watered down... sometimes to the point where it's almost unrecognizable.

In recent memory, just consider the Internet, itself.

There was an "ideal" that it was going to be this giant repository and exchange of FREE information and FREE communication. The original users were outraged when the commercial angle was introduced. Now the Internet is just a giant commercial circus, just like everything else we humans build.

And now we have "Web 3.0" on the horizon. We're all going to become our own bosses, employees, contractors, banks, lenders, borrowers, investors and what have you. And we'll be able to gain great prosperity from the social web.

Forgive my cynicism, but some of it sounds not too different from 1990s chainletters promising people millions in the mail if they just mail out this same chainletter to 500 people. The fundamental breakdown is that "If it's so EASY, everyone is going to do it, and then it will NO LONGER be so easy."

The line between what I might call "functional idealism" and "wishful thinking" seems to be extremely thin.

I suppose my role has long been to play "Devils' Advocate."

We seem to have great ideas for the future, and they look amazing on paper, but those guiding The Good Ship Crypto forward are sometimes turning a bit of a blind eye to the dark corners where the intersection of human psychology and reality are hiding.

=^..^=

CuratorCat, 30th May, 2023