Ask around and you’ll find that crypto participants are, on the whole, tremendously glad to see the back of 2022.
This is not to say that 2023 might not also bring shocks, anything can happen, right now, but the year just passed was so relentlessly catastrophic that it can only be a good thing that it’s over and done with, and we can hope for at least a fractionally more relaxing period.
After such a crashing train wreck of a year, it’s no surprise to find that overall crypto sentiment is muted, while naysayers are emboldened.
Although not so many people will outright proclaim that crypto is dead, or something similarly emphatic, as they were prone to do during previous market collapses, you will certainly find musings as to whether or not crypto actually serves any real-world purpose.
And though, in this way, it’s not stated directly, the implication is that if crypto doesn’t yet have a purpose, or isn’t set to in the foreseeable future, then it may as well be dead, and will eventually expire.
Of the reasons to expect that crypto is now here to stay, one practical, and perhaps prosaic reality is sometimes overlooked: if crypto can exist and it works, on a technical level, then why would we not choose to have it at our disposal? Or to put it another way, crypto has been built, so what reason can there be to expend energy on taking it away again?
A parallel could be drawn with early iterations of the web. One could travel back to the nascent web1 period and observe that (at that moment) web technology had limited numbers of users, and, seemingly, little in the way of real-world connections or impact.
What’s more, you could easily have picked out negative behavior at play, just as you can in the current crypto world. Even early on, in extremely niche web forums, anti-social exchanges, hostility, personal abuse, and raging arguments were far more commonplace than they are in real life.
Witnessing all this, it would have been perfectly reasonable to surmise that the web, or at least the social element of the web, was isolated, perhaps damaging and, as a result, might cease to exist in any significant way.
That outcome, of course, didn’t come to pass, and one reason is that if enough people are sitting at computers all day and computer-based networks…
