Well, it took a while, but I think I finally got it through my skull what crypto is really all about.
Those of you acquainted with my history even to a modest degree probably realize I gravitate toward new technology. My entire life, I have tended to be among the very earliest of adopters. How many people have been online since 1981? I am among them, and I’ve never left. I could cite many examples of being first-in-line, but take my word for it.
So it’s been quite vexing to not “get” crypto, in spite of the pleas and entreaties of others. Yet, during my morning dog walk, a light bulb appeared above my head: specifically, I realized……..crypto was nothing more than a new means to serve the human desire to gamble.
Now, it wasn’t invented for this purpose. We all know the lofty ideals revolving around the crypto bros. However, I don’t think it matters why it was invented. The resulting application, when you get right down to it, is all that truly matters.
I like analogs, so let’s take that route. Let’s says that hundreds of years ago, you were trying to find a fair way to assign a particularly unappealing chore to one of your six children. None of the kids wanted to do it, but it had to be assigned, and being a decent parent, you wanted to do so fairly.
You thus carved a small cube out of wood, and you marked each of the six sides with a symbol. Every day, when the chore had to be assigned, one of the children would roll the cube onto the floor, and once the cube came to rest, the symbol at the top would dictate which child had to do the chore. It was fair, and for the kids, it was even a little exciting to see who would “lose” on any given day.
So, congratulations, you’ve invented the world’s first die. And perhaps you shared your invention with other parents, offering it as a clever way to accomplish the same task in their own families. Through your own ingenuity, you have developed an important new piece of human technology with a noble application. Plus, it was kind of fun.
Unbeknownst to you, others in the town found out about your creation, and it didn’t take long for them to find other applications for it. Instead of using just one die, they would use two (let’s use the plural “dice“). And they came up with all sorts of fun and inventive games using these things, and they decided to make things interesting by putting money on the line. A new form of gambling was invented.
Thus, what started out as a new invention morphed into the foundation for a whole new industry. And if you fast-forward to the modern day, you’ll learn the gambling is a multi-hundred-billion-dollar annual industry and that 34% of adult Americans visit a casino at least once during the course of the year. (Incredible, but true).
I am reminded of this famous Einstein quote:
Well, for all its frailties as a not-very-useful creation, if nothing else, crypto absolutely moves. Where else are you going to find a financial instrument that wiggles around like this (particularly since on such nonsense as the fact Elon was going to host Saturday Night Live back in 2021):
Now THAT is some motion!
There have been many attempts over the years to find something – – ANYTHING!! – – that crypto can do which people actually need. It is perhaps the greatest example in history of A Solution In Search of a Problem. The fact is that crypto doesn’t really solve ANY problem, and even when a major one was invented – – and I’m talking about the creation of Non Fungible Tokens – – that mania only lasted about a year until people (including yours truly) realized how completely brain-dead the entire notion of the NFT “industry” was. What an embarrassment. Just. Plain. Silly.
There was a time I wouldn’t dare say anything negative about crypto, because the crypto crowd are completely nuts and flip out if it’s pointed out that their emperor has no clothes. (This psychosis, incidentally, has been embraced in more recent times by that ChatGPT lunatics, so if I really feel like getting slammed on Twitter, I just ask the crowd how many of them actually used ChatGPT in the course of the last month. Some dork invariably shows up to tell me he invented such-and-so to help him with some personal fitness goal with ChatGPT so I should shut the hell up).
So there you have it. Crypto has stumbled into its purpose: to provide a dopamine hit for countless millions who crave the rush of gambling without needing to fly to Vegas. Funny-looking geniuses like Vitalik Buterin may have never intended this to be the case, and Lord knows they’d never admit it was true, but the fact is that the use case for crypto has been finally discovered, and it is to simply give people the latest mechanism for wagering and the attendant thrill which has made gambling part of human culture for thousands of years.
And that’s all I’ve got to say about that.
