Author: TechFlow

People do not share the same joys and sorrows.

In addition to not taking over each other's business, everyone also ignores each other's market hotspots.

For example, today, everyone is only concerned about the soaring of NOT and the return of RoarKitty, which has led to a surge in GME-related memes, but they have forgotten that today is still an important day for the industry's annual Consensus conference.

Since 2015, the Consensus Conference hosted by CoinDesk has become one of the most important annual gatherings in the global blockchain and cryptocurrency field. At that time, it was once a weathervane of technological innovation and a barometer of investment and regulatory trends.

The annual conference generally brings together the world's crypto industry elites to discuss and shape the future direction of technology and the market.

Often at this time every year, there will be reports about new ideas or topics released at the conference.

But this year, no one seems to have reached a consensus at the Consensus Conference.

Consensus Conference: From a noisy crowd to no consensus

Holding conferences, to some extent, is an explicit reflection of the rise and fall of an industry.

For example, in 2018, when the ICO craze was at its peak, the Consensus Conference was crowded with people, and everyone wanted to smell their own opportunity from the scent of coin issuance; but in the subsequent bear market cycle, the Consensus Conference was a bit dull and boring, and everyone began to discuss Build in a serious manner.

As for this year's Consensus Conference, regardless of whether the market is bullish or bearish, one phenomenon that is easily observed is that few people discussed at the meeting.

Looking through the intensive bombardment of news flashes from various media outlets every minute, you can't even see any information about the consensus conference; it is obvious that the information push mechanism has already screened out "which information is unimportant".

Yes, the market situation is more important.

At that time, the consensus conference that discussed the industry trends and technologies from a high-level perspective gradually led everyone to reach a consensus that "the conference would have little impact on the market."

You start your business and I fire mine.

This separation of industry communication and the behavior of market participants, and the decoupling of authority and attention, make the entire crypto market more like a complete meme playground.

According to the impressions of netizens who attended the conference, the keynote speech audience was sparsely attended, which was incomparable to the heyday of the New York Consensus Conference five years ago.

If the conference itself is not popular, and there are still a lot of memes skyrocketing in the market, then this bull market is more like a localized capital movement and PVP, the industry pie is not getting bigger, there are no more retail investors entering, and Google Trends hot searches are still stable at a low level...

In a structural bull market, will depression be locked up by the information cocoon?

If the perception of individual participants may be a very subjective illusion, then the remarks of the guests sitting on the stage may be more relevant.

Casey, the founder of Ordinals protocol, bluntly stated at Consensus 2024 that 99.99% of the projects participating in the conference are complete shit.

This can't help but remind people of the re-broadcast of the classic emoticon package in the cryptocurrency circle: "Don't get me wrong, I mean everyone here is garbage."

It is obvious that the guests at the meeting know why everyone is here and what kind of people they are.

However, the consensus conference, which represents a weather vane, has gradually been inflated, which inevitably makes the industry's characteristic of form over content more obvious.

Meme Mountain is crowded

In contrast to the lack of consensus at the consensus conference, of course, meme hype is flying all over the place.

NOT is far ahead of the rest, but in fact NOT itself is not a "value coin" in the classical narrative. To some extent, you can still classify it as a more Meme-like type; and the latest data shows that NOT's 24-hour total network transaction volume exceeds 4.6 billion US dollars, second only to BTC and ETH.

Except for NOT, different Memes are like different mountains formed by the impact of attention, and the foot of the mountains are crowded.

Whether it is a political election or a celebrity issuing a coin, it is nothing more than looking for an excuse to hype up attention, and the related new coins will soar; and even old coins may be revived because of a tweet from RoarKitty announcing her return, and it is not uncommon for them to double in a few hours.

Everyone at the foot of different Meme mountains was eager to get on the bus, and no one thought they were standing at the top of the mountain.

In such a mountain climbing competition, WangQiao also pointed out another consensus in Meme hype: if a celebrity buys a certain coin, it is a good thing; if a celebrity issues a certain coin, it is a bad omen.

All the consensus is related to how to play with attention, who brings the goods, what goods they bring, when to buy... all of this has nothing to do with technology.

Making money is the best consensus mechanism

Consensus is often used to describe consensus protocols in blockchain technical documents.

What is a consensus protocol?

To put it simply, it is a method that allows parties that do not trust each other and have no interests to reach an agreement.

Now this technical term has a more humane interpretation:

What is agreed upon may not necessarily be technology, but more likely interests.

For today's crypto market, making money is the best consensus protocol. We should focus on where we can make money.

It is too tiring to work on technology and do practical things, and it is not cost-effective. If you can make money today, then do today's work. This has probably become an unspoken but unspoken consensus among industry players.

The consensus on crypto assets used to be Bitcoin gold and Litecoin silver; then it became Bitcoin gold and Ethereum silver, and now there are even some debates and challengers over whether Ethereum is silver.

There is no fixed position under the gold medal, different sectors and hot spots are vying for attention.

Reaching a consensus often requires a price. I hope that everyone is not the one who pays the price, but the one who holds the profit.