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Vitalik Buterin is afraid that crypto could lead to a bad future, and he's right. Here's why
In Dominik Schiener's opinion, Vitalik Buterin is right to be worried about crypto's potential to be bad. He's also right to be worried.
If you read a major mainstream publication every few months, you'll see that they go above and beyond the "here's a quick primer on crypto" and start digging into the culture (or one of its leaders) with some journalistic rigour. Vitalk Buterin was profiled by Time this month, and the interview was broken up by information about the nerdy fun of ETHDenver.
Vitalik and the Apes are having a good time.
In other words, crypto's public image is in freefall. Why not? People who saw Paris Hilton and Jimmy Fallon's conversation with their Bored Apes were wondering what they should take away from it. There are many reasons why people don't trust crypto, and that's because the crypto space has given the public a lot of them.
A lot of people don't care about how much carbon bitcoin mining uses because they don't know how many tons of CO2 it uses. They think we're comic book villains who spew carbon to make the rich richer, run scams, and evade tax. The rest of it is noise.
The line goes down.
The comment section for Line Goes Up, the two-hour YouTube documentary about NFTs, is full of people who don't like NFTs and don't want to watch the documentary. The video was talked about in tech circles, but now it has 6.5 million views and more. There's no way around it. A lot of people think that the Bored Apes and everyone else is bad because we're giving broken technology to people who are broke. It's our own fault, too.
The things we've let happen in the crypto space and the way people think about it have been bad for mainstream use. This is what Buterin said in an interview with Time: "A lot of people in the cryptocurrency space were reminded that the goal of cryptocurrency isn't to play games with million-dollar pictures of monkeys. It is to make money."
Elon Musk doesn't care about you on Twitter, and it's not your job to make him notice you. People who had never heard of Dogecoin before knew that it went down during Elon Musk's Saturday Night Live show. When there are volatile markets, and then there's what that was, and it hit right in the middle.
Meme coins in general are bad for crypto because they don't show people how good it is. Traders who know what they're doing make a lot of money from them, but people who don't know what they're doing lose out. A doge eat doge world is easy to mock. Short-term pride might not be worth the long-term cost.
Our own scams
The joke, maybe, is that meme coins don't have as many scams as coins that say they have a real use. It's easy to fool people who aren't very knowledgeable about crypto by giving them a technical roadmap and a DevOps team, for example, only to pull the rug under them and take all their money. These memecoins aren't volatile, so this doesn't happen to them It happens when pump-and-dump projects are disguised as something more solid, meant to attract investors who have never heard of them before.
So, government regulators are putting their hands on our throats. We know that we can be banned from the whole country. China did it. We're in the western part of the country, and Canada did a good job of it during the trucker convoy. We are putting a target on our own backs, but we act like it's not a big deal. Is that what we gave up crypto's genuinely good for society and almost utopian premise for? To call people on Twitter "FUD" and trade apes and scam people because they "deserve" it?
Instead of welcoming newcomers with open arms, we're making them leave. This isn't just a PR mess. It's a threat to the whole future of crypto, and the call comes from inside the house.
Out of smugness, we should not try to kill off mainstream adoption and our public image just because we think we're smart. Vitalik is right, and I agree with what he says about this. Get it together.
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