Does Crypto Have Any Good Use Cases?

We’re at the fun part of the market where crypto has lost trillions of dollars in value and people are scrambling to make up reasons why it’s useful.

Many of these reasons are painfully cringe attempts to copy the new technology onto old paradigms in a masochistic sort of skeuomorphism that would only be envisioned by marketers and influencers who have never built the kind of technology they’re LARPing as innovators of. “Facebook could give everyone a META token and you earn more of it when you get Likes and you can cash that out for ETH and…”

Crypto is EARLY. Painfully early. If you’ve ever used any of the types of applications I talk about in this newsletter then you know the user experience is usually terrible. If you make a careless error you might lose all your money. If you pick a token at random it’s more likely a scam or shitcoin than anything legitimate. And we’re still five to ten years out from anything close to mass adoption of anything besides HODL and speculative gambling.

That doesn’t mean there’s nothing there, though. Crypto and the blockchain technology it’s built on do have the potential to create a new wave of the Internet, it’s just going to take some time. And to understand that potential, it’s helpful to look at some of the past major paradigm shifts in technology and see what we can learn from them.

Let’s start with mobile. The mobile revolution enabled:

• A new physical form of interacting with computers (small touch screens)
• New sensory forms of interacting with computers (audio, kinetic, visual w/ cameras)
• Mobility, you weren’t tethered to an office anymore

From those few things, we got an incredible amount of innovation. An amount that would have been hard to predict if you just had that list as your starting point. Uber needed mobile computers. Snapchat and Instagram wouldn’t exist without the cameras. Fitness apps needed kinetic sensors. Podcasts and Audiobooks needed computers with audio on the go. But none of those applications are obvious from the basic set of innovations.

The Internet is even simpler. What did it do, really? You could sum it up at the foundational level with: Computers can now talk to each other. You don’t need to be physically in front of some computer to utilize a process that’s living on it. And from that simple innovation, we got all of this.