The money always came.

Always late, sometimes very late and after a few reminders,

in four or more different currencies, and to and from different continents and
banks and accounts- but my salary always ended up in my hands in the end and in the
right amount at that. The Swedish tax agency is still trying to figure out what to
do with my three years in crypto as we speak. But as long as the money came, I
could sustain my continued work. Also, the money legitimized my carreer choice to
family and friends. They didn't get what I was doing but if I got paid, surely it
must be something good?

When it came to organizational tasks, though, you never knew what to expect. I
tried for more than a year to get a raise in the organisation I was working in, but
I simply got no replies from the responsible individuals. The project I was working
at first seemed to run out of steam - was I suddenly the only one left working on
it? I did my best to keep it going by myself but felt out of the loop. I tried to
reach out to some colleagues on a similar project. I got a lot of support from most
of them, but a single, authorative voice dominated our meetings. This voice was
critical of me from the start, but eventually told me they would not work with me
at all. The reason? My project had already been cancelled, I was clearly a
freeloader! However, this was the first time anyone had told me about its
cancellation.

When the re-organization came, someone asked at a company-wide meeting, "Who is

accountable for the decisions of who's let go and not?" This question was deftly
dodged with a politician's vagueness and literal giggles by the de facto central
authority of the company and in the end, even when the calls came, no-one seemed to
have any idea of who had decided to let them go, according to what criteria or with
what motivation.

This was the supposed dream job in tech; working to make the world a better place
by improving democracy with bleeding edge technology while travelling the world and
going to crazy parties, but it was weird. It was surreal. Or maybe it was unreal?

Cryptocurrencies are known most of all as a volatile investment. They're a way for
daytraders and VCs to speculate. But their real value, outside of being more poorly
regulated start-up shares, is supposed to lie in de-centralization. This is the
mechanism of moving away from a central point of power and outwards and downwards
towards individuals, creating more stable and flexible organs of co-operation both
between humans and machines. This is like going from monarch to republic to
representative democracy to direct democracy (and so on, one would hope).

The dream is that with technology to supports this mechanism, we will eventually
make this happen everywhere in civizilation, both in small and large scale. And
even now, the concept of de-centralized currency itself is revolutionary already.
Enforcing nation state law on it is difficult.

Bitcoin is a de-centralized cryptocurrency and it is being used over Fiat

alternatives for this exact reason. It gives some of the broken parts of the "old"
money system an alternative. For instance giving the Venezuelans a more stable
currency than their native bolívar fuerte, which is weak from mismanagement. New
cryptocurrencies could be minted for the regions lacking liquidity, or put simply,
cash flow. This would stimulate economic activity where, right now, there are
humans working and surviving but without partaking in the money game. It could
feasibly spell an end to the corruption which has now turned into a civil war in
Cameroon and lead to so many other similar situations. There is no telling how much
good could be done with it.

But then again, at the moment it's mostly used for drug dealing on an online black
market, exit schemes and tax evasion. Furthermore, keeping the slow and expensive
system alive has a huge environmental cost. Where does the dream meet reality?

My motivation for joining the scene was the constant confirmation of how broken and
over-centralised the current, or "old", money system is, even in economically
healthy regions. Clearly, we have lots of work to do. Are we fixing it now? Are we
on the right path?

There's no shortage of optimistic answers to these questions in the business.

There's also no lack of skill, vision or money here. A lot of motivated,
knowledgable individuals have gathered behind an array of strong and moving visions
to create transformative technology in order to make the world better. Personally,
I have met some of my favorite people here. I don't doubt a lot of the answers
given are good and will eventually play out in reality. And though all of that
feels comforting, it doesn't necessarily guarantee we're not marching full-speed in
the wrong direction.

So we're all getting paid and flown around to conferences and workshops, working
hard and passionately hacking away at thousands of code-bases and cool projects.
That doesn't sound like a pyramid scheme, does it? Sure, corporate culture has been
taking over more, with lots of enterprise and Big Money joining the game. And yeah,
we used to have hacker culture and functioning informalism and now we have shadow
hierarchies, ad campaigns and politicians. But that doesn't mean it's a scam or a
charlatan's work, right? It's experimental! We need inclusivity for this space ship
to take off!

Well, yes, I do agree with all of the above, except the lenient attitude to power
abuse. But more than this I get the feeling there should be more than a
speculation-driven black market to show for it, more than drug dealing and tax-
evasion. Where is it? Where are the products? Where are the apps, devices and
services that supposedly can make our lives better?

No, no, no. I'm not talking about a show-reel. Of course there are well-functioning
blockchain apps with practical use-cases. Good work, honestly! But where are the
apps real-world users are relying on? Where is an actual, important use-case being
met?

When no users are relying on the products, no amount of failure in their design
will have real consequences. If this is the case, but the money still keeps on
flowing, what becomes the metric for success? What is the direction and how is it
chosen? And how can we know if it's good?

Measuring success in crypto right now is purely subjective. If you gain the favour
of your peers, you are successful. If you write a paper that others agree with, you
are a good thinker. If the talks you give at conferences feel relevant to the
audience, you are a good community member. If you keep getting investments from
VCs, you are doing good business. If you have respect you are productive. This is
often the case to a certain degree in life - we are not perfectly rational beings.
But here, I argue, it has gone too far and its effects are too strong.

So, in simple terms, I argue: the crypto bubble is not an economic instability in a
start-up sector, it's a barrier that keeps crypto visions and basic reality apart.
That barrier is made out of misdirected investments and the way we experience it is
through surreal, nonsensical events that nevertheless are accepted as natural.

The bubble is a cancer in social life, eating away at conversations and

relationships inside the sphere with its combination of power and lack of meaning.
It drives decision-making, strategy and beliefs without having substance. Living in
the crypto bubble is like living in the matrix, it's not real, it's theatre. It's a
cyberpunk live-action roleplay. The crypto LARP. Logic inside it is as meaningful
to real-world problems as dialogue in a fantasy novel.

What needs to happen is collision. The spaceship must dock. The dreams must land,
walk the earth, get to know the people, the places and all the details of the
environment. The ideas must learn to live and stand on their own legs. To learn to
walk, they must be allowed to fall. What crypto needs is failure, failure, failure.
All kinds of failure and hard truths and pains. The collision will not be pretty
and many hearts will be broken, but the end result will be a stronger, more mature
industry and a better direction towards de-centralization.

How can this happen? Perhaps the hype must die. Perhaps through major scandals or
continued embarrassment, the inflated ego of the eco-system must collapse. Maybe it
could be through compromise. Regulation and acquisition into the old world is a
strange form of success for a revolution, but it would be like how music piracy
turned into services like Spotify because the user base was given a safe, legal,
somewhat bloated and ineffective alternative. It could be through global economic
crisis or it could be through some other, previously unthought of challenge on a
large scale. But ultimately, at its core, the feverish flow of money must stop in
some way if the industry is to grow out of its doted infantile stage. It simply has
to be allowed to fail to be allowed to learn.

The metric for success should be meaningful use by real people and by that it is
currently failing. We're headed the wrong way.

Or maybe not? What do you think? Do you disagree with me and think that the
equation goes: talent + passion + money = progress, or some variation to this?

Is there any mechanism of which salaries without costumers or real-world use can be
well-guided? Can you think of a KPI that would be truly meaningful that isn't just
"more real and important use-cases"?

Or are there other ways than accepting failure to deflate an economic bubble?

Since things are accelerating so quickly in tech, there might be no perfect

comparison in history. But we have had many bubbles before, did any of them do
something to adapt less violently than a with a POP after blowing up?

Whatever the next step is, whether crypto can progress through painful collision or
continued nurturing by pocket money from old daddy finance, or even if crypto loses
its edge and de-centralization has to go through a different movement, it will find
a way. The dreams are alive, whether they are of improving our world with
democratic ideals, making money better suited to its tasks or fighting corruption
and all forms of power abuse, the real-world problems persist and so do the
motivation to solve them.