Among my peers, I have been the most optimistic about blockchain and its future, but lately this bear market is taking its toll on me. I am beginning to be filled with a constant pall of FUD.
Here are my reasons:
1. What if I'm wrong? Nobody invests in something they don't believe in, but we have all had bad investments - therefore not everything we believed in was good. What if I'm wrong about public blockchains? Blockchain has a future, but maybe it's in private blockchain like HyperLedger?
2. What decentralization? Part of what is feeding this FUD I have is that I have an extremely diversified crypto portfolio, and yet despite this everything is down right now, and it pisses me off. The entire crypto market value is centralized around bitcoin. I really like bitcoin, but I don't want everything to revolve around it. That doesn't make sense in an ideal decentralized world.
3. Value proposition?. I once had a heated argument with someone who insisted the value of crypto was purely speculative. I argued that it was high value because it's following the S-curve of adoption, and therefore we expect it to be hyperbolic and absorb everything. That was back in Dec. Now in March I see that he was right. S-curve of adoption doesn't look like this. The market looks exactly like the early and speculative days of an emerging asset class.
4. If we build it, will they come? A lot of critics of blockchain say that blockchain has no use, even after 10 years. My counter-argument would be that after 10 years, we're still developing infrastructure. It would be like the Internet in the 80s - we didn't really see e-commerce appear until the late 90s.
Ethereum is an example of infrastuture building that's still in a beta phase. It's not scalable yet. Buterin said that Ethereum's scaling plan will roll out over the next 5 years (!).
But what if we build all this infrastructure and the world doesn't care? I told my friends that what blockchain gives us is not necessarily BETTER services, but decentralized services. We can all become our own "mini-Google" or "mini-youtube" - not just users of Google or youtube but actually create our own Google or Youtube without spending hundreds of millions of dollars. Blockchain allows us the promise of decentralizing everything - from banks to services that would normally require giant corporations. But what if this is just a pipe dream?
Power Ledger is a good example of this. Rather than depending on the services of a centralized power generating corporation, we can all be our own mini-power-generator, serviced using the Power Ledger network. Power Ledger is a really good example of a real-life decentralized service that is attractive, relatable and sensible. I think people WILL use it. People are interested in buying the hardware required to generate their own clean energy, so connecting to a micro-grid and Power Ledger's service makes sense. But does a decentralized ebay make sense? Or a decentralized youtube? Many services are served better when they are centralized, because people come to expect a consistency in experience and service.
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Can anyone counter-argue these? I'm starting to lose faith. I was up over 200% in January, now today I have just dropped below break-even. I HODLed, and I feel like an irresponsible fool. It's hard to be optimistic when an entire diversified crypto portfolio is in the red.
I appreciate your comfort right now.