… the founding ideas are promising, and something I dream of.
Before I start, just a little bit of background on me so you can understand how biased I am (😅): I’m a 16 years old programmer and I won a few crypto hackathon/funding rounds and I made a lot of friends in the field. It allowed me to get quite a bit of ETH/XMR along the way!
I see cryptocurrencies getting a lot of hate, rightly so for the number of scams, shitcoins, NFTs bullshit, “governance”, DAOs and all those often useless & snob terms.
However the founding ideas of decentralisation and freedom with your money are very appealing to me. Smart contracts are really interesting for creating your own banking operation and tokens can represent anything! It’s a world of possibilities to play with, and you get to build something useful for people!
I’d just like to add a bit of nuance tho: I see a lot of apps being built and what’s really making me laugh is the lack of open-source, decentralisation and auditing on privacy. Granted, there is a lot of fake promises, but it’s like everything, you have to find the talented people to follow.
I find it fascinating to build unstoppable, decentralised, user-first apps. I just hope that web3 stays true to its founding principles.
Hope it was interesting, tell me what you think!
EDIT: title+typos+the game is not comfortably played in Act 2
It just isn’t though. The major currency, bitcoin, was made avalible in 2008, there weren’t any scams going on back then. It was meant to be as simple as a decentralised currency that the people had full control over. I think that’s a great thing. It wasn’t until scammers and grifters saw a new market that could be exploited because it required a good understanding of how it works to be used properly. Scammers dumbed it down and huge centralised exchanges came in opening the door to scams. However it’s definitely not a currency yet, I’ll agree, it’s more of an asset. It’s such a shame that a technology that could’ve helped put people in full control of their money has been diluted into such a shit show. Whenever I hear about a new project touting “crypto based” or Blockchain i wince like I’m sure you do, because NOW it’s become a scam, it wasn’t originally.
It took all of 6 years for banks and scams to be reinvented – mt gox was in 2014
And that’s why 10 years later, for 2024, the EU is requiring every crypto exchange to register as a bank, follow KYC and AML procedures, along with reporting everyone’s balances to the country’s Treasury.