Spend too much time on crypto Twitter (known in affectionate shorthand as CT), or in the tangled web of associated blogs, podcasts and online publications that revolve around crypto, and you can start to feel like you’re in a different world.
In crypto, priorities and preferences are very different to those found elsewhere, with an example being the amount of ETH that deeply crypto-immersed buyers were willing to throw at NFTs throughout 2021 and the first half of 2022 (and ongoing, although sales volumes have declined).
To an outsider, spending the equivalent of hundreds of thousands of dollars on, in some instances, a JPEG animal illustration in NFT format was simply incomprehensible. And yet, from a crypto-based perspective (and especially for those with deep ETH-rich pockets), such trades made sense at the time and continue to do so now.
The dollar-value of ETH may be down, but NFTs from the Bored Ape Yacht Club collection currently change hands for a minimum of 76 ETH, reduced from over 150 ETH at their peak, but core to a project that is buoyant and actively developing, and not forgetting that at the time of launch, Bored Apes sold for just 0.08 ETH.
Considering the idea of distinct communities that are, or originally were, angled away from the mainstream, crypto starts to resemble the counter-cultural spheres that typically emerge around, for example, art, music and literature, and sometimes at the tech fringes.
It’s noteworthy, when considering the future of crypto, that some countercultures wind up, in the end, entering the mainstream, or perhaps irrevocably altering the mainstream to the point where they can inhabit it.
Look at the history of Bitcoin and crypto, and it becomes apparent that throughout the fourteen years since Bitcoin launched, varying hopes and narratives have become attached to crypto, depending on prevalent social issues.
Bitcoin was enabled as a direct reaction to the global financial crises of 2007/8, as implicitly indicated by a message encoded into the Bitcoin genesis block, which reads:
“The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks.”
Initially, Bitcoin was an antidote to financial malfeasance, but also, according to its proponents at least, to deep irreparable fault lines that extend out from the core…
