“Number go up” was a problem in tech long before crypto
The ills of token speculation are frustrating, sure. But the history of the web1 bubble provides useful perspective and lessons for this new era.
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One frequent criticism of blockchain technology you hear is that it’s only useful for betting on token prices.
From a technical standpoint, I don’t believe that’s true at all. Much more accurate to say speculation is often all people want to talk about. Sure, we tend to allow that topic to suck a lot of oxygen out of the proverbial room. But isn’t that really a problem with us, not the technology?
This is also a very familiar pattern in the tech industry, if your memory (ahem) stretches back far enough.
The 1990s dotcom bubble was plenty speculative, absurd, reckless and, yes, scammy in places. But even with all that era’s nonsense, some things of lasting value were still built.
Just to cite a few examples: Google, Amazon, and eBay are all still very much with us. The Netscape browser lives on, in a fashion, as the open-source Firefox browser. And the guys who built Netscape are now the biggest venture investors in Silicon Valley.
Does that negate all the insane marketing stunts, IPOs backed by no earnings, bogus analyst ratings of stocks, and other excesses of the late 1990s? No. But that’s exactly my point.
This stuff — all the positive and all the negative — happened at the same time, side by side. The biggest mistake one could make is to reduce that era’s history to just the awesome parts or just the unsavory ones.
You have to reckon with all of it, not just the parts that are convenient for you.
Web3 is a similarly mixed bag in the present day, I believe. Are Bitcoin and Ethereum, now worth a combined $1.6 trillion (with a “t”) and with increasing ties into the traditional financial world, going to suddenly collapse and disappear at this point?
Probably not, in my opinion. They’re here to stay.
At the same time, is Dogecoin a bunch of bullshit? Yes. Undoubtedly.
It has ever been thus. Get used to it.
