It's a trap!
Avoid becoming jaded at all costs
One of the biggest challenges in Crypto when you've been around long enough is having the ability to remain open-minded and positive about new developments.
This, of course, is easier said than done.
After years of seeing our heroes turn to villains, empty promises and broken dreams, highs and lows, scams and hacks and bank balances that went high enough to retire sent to zero. It's no surprise that people become jaded.
Yes, when something new and interesting comes out it's likely that it initially won't be very good.
It'll be buggy and slow, and 5% as good as a web 2.0 equivalent.
People will laugh at it. They will deride you for using it. They'll call it a scam because everything that came before it matched that criteria. Their internal pattern recognition dial becomes a protection mechanism designed to protect them from past mistakes.
It's very very easy for someone, and in particular very intelligent people, to explain reasons why something will not work.
It takes a bit more nuanced thinking, optimism, and creativity to explain why something that at present is pretty mediocre might achieve mass success in the future.
We've seen this time and time again in practically every industry.
The internet was described as a fad, the desktop computer, the telephone apparently had too many shortcomings, even cars were predicted to never replace horses.
Human beings, it seems, are very good predictors of what might happen in the very short term, but incredibly bad at thinking on longer time horizons.
In Crypto specifically, of course, there are tons of risks. The team might not deliver. Developers may overpromise. The regulators may stop it. The banks may lobby to shut it down. Their code may be hacked, or wallets compromised.
But where there is a glimmer, there is a chance.
Where there are memetics, there is a community capable of building network effects.
Where there is a badly working product with a good idea, there is a future reality where the good idea is matched with a good product.
But staying positive and trying to imagine a future reality where something gains mass adoption, breaks the mould, and actually works is the reason I'm still here.
It's the reason I still invest, and it's the reason I still wake up every day and spend vast quantities of time in community Discords interacting with people attempting to build this future.
I simply won't let myself spend the best part of this decade focusing on Crypto and get shaken out at the stage where we finally develop useful products just because some of the past ones turned out to be a bit rubbish!