On Emotionally Adjusted Bullishness and Technology Hype Cycles

"Are you still working in crypto?" // "What do you think about generative AI?"

Recently a friend asked me if I was still working in crypto, and if I was still bullish on its future. 

I said that “emotionally adjusted, I am more bullish on crypto”. 

She asked what emotionally adjusted meant - by that I meant in the peak of the bull market, every idea sounded like a great idea. NFT this, DeFi 3.0 that, web3 gaming this, DAO that - the party was going, koolaid flowing - it was hard not to be bullish. 

I was giga bullish at the time, but my emotional inclinations added a rosy tint to how I was seeing everything. Perhaps similar to some of the current emotional fervor around LLMs and generative AI, these days it’s emotionally easy to latch onto the consensus view to think “this changes everything” (fwiw I do think it changes a lot, but Carlota Perez was certainly right in how tech bubbles/hype cycles work).  

I think that now I understand much more of the technology and what’s uniquely enabled by blockchains and internet native “value” (“cryptocurrencies”). Not everything needs to the decentralized or permissionless. Perhaps one double edged sword of the religious fervor of web3 is that the underlying technology is abstracted into a meme. 

It’s like a game of telephone where the first person says “DAOs are a new type of internet organization” and last person hears “DAOs will change organizations forever”. 

But some very important things do need to be decentralized and permissionless – like being able to store and use monetary value independently from authoritarian states or hyperinflationary currencies. One just needs to look outside the US to respond to the “crypto is only for gambling on mars“ argument.

Despite all the noise, drama, and most of all, greed, I remain long term optimistic that crypto will have more and more of a positive impact on the world.