The first time I heard of crypto and bitcoin was in 2016. It was all the hype in the local tech community, people were excited about it, talking about peer-to-peer payments without a bank, a new form of money, something that will change the world, etc
I got curious and decided to really research the topic, understand what bitcoin is, how it works and find out if this was just another ponzi-style scam based on hype and new people buying it or if there really was something behind it.
I went with the most technical book explaining how bitcoin works I could find: “Mastering Bitcoin: Programming the Open Blockchain” by Andreas Antonopoulos. It’s a very good technical book with the mathematical and economic foundations of the blockchain, and it even has a description of how to program on bitcoin.
I read it with passion for a few weeks, my first dip in “crypto”. I got to understand why bitcoin uses a blockchain, how transactions are sent, what is the 51% attack, etc. I didn’t finish it, but I liked the book.
In the end, I put the book on my desk and thought, “This is a very nice technical concept, but there is no use-case for it. You don’t need a blockchain to make payments, your bank already does that. You never needed to ‘program money’, why would we need it now?”
I was thinking of buying 1 BTC with some of my spare change to mark the fact that I had gone through all that, but the price had increased again in the meantime and I didn’t want to put in so much money for the new fad of the day, 1 BTC was 800 USD!
Today my decisions can seem a bit silly, I could have got 0.1 BTC instead of a whole BTC, I could have diversified the info I got about the blockchain and it’s uses.
The main point stayed though, my perception was that crypto had no “utility”, no killer app that would make it find a niche of usage and not disappear in a crash in 2 weeks.
What I didn’t realize was that the killer app of the crypto was already right in front of me. Here by killer app I mean a very desirable use-case that cements the usage of the technology in a niche and then expands it.
For example, in the old days when people were used to listen to the radio or the VHF television in the evenings, some people created a complicated thing called the TCP/IP protocol for computer networks (1974) and the internet was born! The web browser (Netscape Navigator in 1994, Internet Explorer, now Google Chrome, Firefox, etc.) is the killer application for that protocol.
It started with some techies, and niche businesses writing the first web pages about their hobbies, games or expertise. Then more and more people really wanted to try the ‘new’ internet and watch cat pictures and porn on it, and then it was everywhere in the lives of everyone: gradually, then suddenly.
For a killer app, you need people who really, really want something as a result of using the new technology. A technology can start with one killer app and evolve with other ones later on as it reaches more and different people.
The killer app of crypto is not money (for now…). The killer app is what you thought about when I said I had the opportunity to buy bitcoin at 800 USD, it is what most people buying bitcoin in 2016 were doing, it would later make a name for an entirely new category of financial assets, motivate thousands of institutional and private investors around the globe for something they really, really want.
The killer app of crypto is degen gambling.
This is the application that would bring masses to the crypto ecosystem in an undisputed niche and pave the way for the other applications of the blockchain; and I did not see it coming…
It’s funny though, even after I realized that it would still take me years and years before I realized something else that was right in front of me all along, something that maybe even you my crypto friend you don’t consciously realize yet:
The US Dollar, the Euro, the Japanese Yen,... fiat money is also degen gambling.
How is that possible? That will be a story for the next episodes.
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I agree with you, degen gambling is currently the most successful use-case but it is not the only one and many new ones are coming, also thanks to the success of that use-case.
I have nothing against degen gambling personally. Here I mean that among the ways people use it right now, degen gambling is the most popular.
The way I see it the underlying tech is just a tool that can be used to achieve this or that goal.
Degen gambling is not an intrinsic attribute of cryptocurrencies and I think that saying that it is the current killer app does not tarnish the tool or the goals of people creating/using it.
In another episode I should discuss more what I mean by degen gambling I guess.
What do you think of the other point: "The US Dollar, the Euro, the Japanese Yen,… fiat money is also degen gambling."?