“ Think of cryptocurrency as a new planet that is being settled.”
The following is the original text (the easter egg is at the end):
It’s useful to think of cryptocurrency as a new planet that’s being settled.
Skeptics see it as a desolate planet with no purpose. Or worse, a haven for disgusting casinos.
Optimists see the potential of the planet: we can build upgraded financial systems and internet platforms on a clean sheet of paper.
The early settlers were a mixed bag. Explorers, drawn to the frontier. Speculators, some rough and tumble. Innovators and researchers, drawn to new possibilities. Ordinary people, especially those on the margins of the planet.
Governance remains murky. Some Earth jurisdictions ban their citizens from visiting. Others seek a foothold in the New World.
A history of speculation and hype cycles has created a social taboo around this new planet, leaving many wondering: what is its future?
Today’s casino-like speculation is part of the process of self-reliance. Just as the 1849 Gold Rush transformed San Francisco from a quaint village into a major port (and eventually a center of technological innovation), today’s cryptocurrency speculation frenzy is attracting settlers and facilitating the necessary infrastructure to turn a barren planet into a thriving crypto civilization.
A new crypto planet. Bitcoin enthusiasts are the first settlers here. Exchanges like Coinbase and Binance let you move in and out of the planet. Ethereum is the biggest city, and Uniswap is the best way to get around here…
1. “Why encryption?”
Colonizing a new planet takes a lot of work. Why is it worth doing?
New property rights systems are most needed where existing systems fail. Cryptocurrency-based currencies like Bitcoin, Ethereum, and stablecoins are used around the world, but their adoption by ordinary people varies most in places like Argentina, Turkey, and Ukraine.
Many skeptics wondered when the “killer app” for cryptocurrency would arrive, but it turns out it has already arrived. For those who can’t see it, some form of first-world privilege is at work.
Like a fish asking “what exactly is water?”, cryptocurrencies can be difficult to understand when strong property rights, economic freedoms, and monetary stability are taken for granted.
Ask anyone in Argentina about cryptocurrency and they won’t doubt its usefulness. Today, cryptocurrency is useful on the low end and speculative on the high end. But it is improving fast, and — in a classic case of Christensen’s disruptive innovation — cryptocurrency is rapidly becoming more useful to more people.
Money is the first killer app, but it won’t be the last. Cryptocurrency will naturally lead to transparent, programmable, and publicly accessible crypto financial services. Many people cannot access banking services due to high costs.
Others distrust the increasingly centralized banking system. Crypto finance offers a cheaper, more convenient, and more inclusive solution. Stablecoin payments are on the rise. Loans can be obtained through code rather than through complex banking or brokerage processes. Even systemic risk can be reduced by globally tracking collateral.
Beyond currency and finance, as crypto infrastructure expands, it will support new consumer applications. We will see creators take ownership of their creativity and users gain more control over their identities.
Zooming out, the new planet is an opportunity to rebuild anew. Cryptocurrency is to money, finance, and digital property what the internet is to information and media. Many existing systems are fragile and rigid, descendants of a pre-digital age. Through crypto, we will upgrade systems and build new ones that were not possible before.
Just as importantly, cryptocurrencies are a bulwark against an increasingly centralized world. People have been eager to choose sides in the war between big media and big tech, big banks and big government, but like a frog in boiling water, we have unwittingly accepted a world where everything is "big." By enabling the small and the many to coordinate, cryptocurrencies are an important check and balance against centralized power, and ultimately a force for freedom in the world.
2. Speculation and Cryptocurrency
Despite the possible benefits of cryptocurrencies, is all this speculation necessary? It turns out that speculation is not only necessary, but also productive.
Speculative investing is an integral part of technological revolutions. From the telecommunications and internet booms to the rise of railroads, electricity, and automobiles, new technological breakthroughs have always been intertwined with speculation and asset bubbles on their way to the mainstream—a phenomenon well documented by Carlota Perez.
Speculation in the cryptocurrency space helps increase attention and awareness, investment funds, talent inflow, infrastructure development, academic research, existing adoption, and more.
But speculation and cryptocurrencies are also linked at a deeper level: Speculation is the "hello world" of digital property rights. Make it possible for people to create scarce assets, and they'll be inclined to trade them. Just give a bunch of kids some Pokemon cards and see what happens.
The point of a new property rights system is to reliably record property transfers, so people will naturally experiment. If this new system does not yet have broad legality, the range of possible futures will be wide, so prices will fluctuate and trading activity will appear speculative.
In the early days of Bitcoin, it seemed crazy to think that it would one day reach the legitimacy and value it has today — I remember because I was there. Early adopters had a lot of fun. They mined, contributed, experimented, and even bought pizza. Now, more than a decade later, BTC and other crypto assets like ETH are well on their way to transitioning from speculative toys to global monetary commodities.
Speculation is also critical to the development of cryptocurrency as a decentralized financial system. Many financial products have so-called "utility" on one side of the transaction, but require speculation on the other side to achieve it.
For example, a person may need a 30-year mortgage to buy a house, but there is no natural demand to mortgage a house for 30 years. Instead, our modern financial system mediates between the utility need for mortgages and the more abstract need for income finance.
In the cryptocurrency space, a similar financial system is being built that includes speculative traders, exchange infrastructure providers, market makers, MEV searchers, block builders, DeFi protocols, stablecoin issuers, Uniswap arbitrageurs, and more.
This new crypto-financial system requires bootstrapping an N-sided market, which is not easy and takes time. But over time, participants become more sophisticated, liquidity increases, and the capabilities of the on-chain financial market become stronger.
3. The Dark Side of Casinos
Much of the crypto skepticism lacks imagination, but some of it is well-deserved. While casinos are a helpful bootstrap, they can also be annoying and counterproductive.
Innovation depends on capital and labor being applied to valuable experiments. Too much speculation, drop farming, and other shenanigans add noise to price signals that could otherwise inform productive innovation.
Even the most well-intentioned entrepreneurs can be deceived by false prices or distracted by short-term profits, ultimately slowing down the process of building what’s actually needed to build a cryptocurrency.
Short-term speculation is also a zero-sum game, where experienced traders extract value from newcomers and potentially burn them out forever. Free markets accommodate all types of participants, and there is nothing wrong with short-term traders as long as they act legally and ethically.
But if we think of cryptocurrency adoption in part as a social coordination game, then choosing the best time horizon can become a prisoner’s dilemma. By collectively thinking longer term, we might reach a more encouraging end.
Finally, there are too many bad actors: scammers, liars, and black hat hackers. Imagine a roaming gang of bandits who greet newcomers with beatings and robberies — welcome to San Francisco Crypto! Like the Wild West or the early Internet, the open frontier fosters innovation, but also invites misconduct.
There are far more good actors than bad ones — cryptocurrencies are lucky to have some of the world’s leading white-hat security experts, for example — but some self-regulation or regulation may be needed.
4. “What’s taking so long?”
Cryptocurrency is almost 15 years old. Shouldn’t it be mainstream by now?
It turns out that colonizing a new planet takes time, and most people won't move to a new planet until the infrastructure is mature and it's no longer a social taboo.
The technology can only advance so fast. The social spread of new ideas can be volatile. The speculative nature of the asset class leads to cyclical whipsaws: one moment crypto is the future of everything, the next crypto is dead.
Building social consensus around cryptocurrencies is even more challenging than developing network effects around communications protocols or social networks. People immediately see the utility of WhatsApp or Instagram because they can communicate with a small number of friends they already know.
New property rights are meant to allow for secure transactions with people you don’t know or trust, so more general legitimacy is needed. While there is still a long way to go, it’s worth noting that today you can already transact with over 100 million people using BTC, ETH, or stablecoins.
5. "Looking back at the casino in the past"
Many technologies we now take for granted were once considered impossible, useless, dangerous, and/or fraudulent.
Today, Apple is the most valuable company in the world, but when it first went public in 1980, Massachusetts banned the sale of Apple stock because of its risks.
Intel CEO Andy Grove said in 1992 that “the idea of a personal communicator in everyone’s pocket is a pipe dream driven by greed.”
In 1865, a Boston newspaper said of the telephone: "It is impossible to transmit the human voice through wires... Even if it could be done, the object would be of no practical value."
Cryptocurrency is no exception. Bitcoin has been declared dead every year since 2010. People are unhappy with the risk, volatility, and speculation of cryptocurrencies. Skeptics argue that the technology doesn’t scale or is insecure. Even if it works, it’s useless.
There is a strong bias against maintaining the status quo and against change. Sometimes the more disruptive the change, the stronger the skepticism. Cryptocurrencies involve deep ideas about money, value, governance, and human coordination. These are not topics we are used to rethinking, and naturally some people will find it ridiculous to try. But their fundamental nature is all the more reason to be open to building something better.
The existence of skepticism is not an argument against cryptocurrencies, but equally, it is not an argument for them. Many hyped technologies have failed, and cryptocurrencies may not live up to expectations.
The surest way to figure this out is to ignore the skepticism or hype and think for yourself. Try visiting new planets. Look beyond the speculation and pay attention to what real builders are building and what real people are using.
Cryptocurrency speculation may be off-putting at times, but it’s part of the bootstrapping mechanism for one of the most important technologies of our time.
6. Conclusion
What Easter eggs are hidden in the pictures of this viral article?
The devil's in the details
All buildings are solid colors, except Solana, which is gradient color, suggesting that Solana is entering a new era (dealer)
The mining cart represented by Paradigm is emerald green, with a small one in front of Starknet and a large one in front of Optimism, suggesting that Paradigm is more optimistic about OP's ecology and wealth effect.
Starknet is the only privacy track product that has appeared
The two Layer2s, Starknet and OP, are in the foreground, giving them enough focus. The building with a ring on top of the OP disk has 7 floors (white windows), representing a total of 7 airdrops.
The Uniswap pink train has 3 carriages, implying the iteration of 3 versions, v2, v3 and v4, representing the replacement of 3 Dex eras.
In the center of the building complex, Ethereum’s iconic prismatic logo is not the logo of the Ethereum network, but the specific gradient color scheme of the Ethereum Foundation, suggesting that the city relies on the decision-making drive of the Ethereum Foundation.
The orange building in the upper left corner represents BTC. The classic logo image of BTC with two contacts on the top and bottom is not used, implying that the "shackles" at both ends have been cut off, which may be a reference to the future changes to the 21 million upper limit.
There are three semicircles on each side of the btc building, implying that there are currently 6 engineers supporting the bitcoin core dev
The FTX rocket on the far left has exploded. The Coinbase logo is written in two lines, representing COIN (a US-listed company) + Base (Layer 2), but it is not written on the base. The FTX and Binance logos are written on the base, implicitly praising Coinbase and disparaging the other two.
There are only three entities that are not connected to the central Ethereum through pipes, Coinbase and Paradigm, which highlights that Paradigm is compliant and regulated. The horn on the emerald green mining car represents "publicity", which is in line with the theme of regulation.
The truth is often hidden in obscure information
✏️Disclaimer: This article is for reference only, DYOR
Source: Alpha Investment Research, Matt Huang, 0xjuu_17
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