There's an inherent sense of irony that permeates crypto's culture, particularly in the idea of being "early." We've all seen the technology innovation adoption cycle graph. We've all read Crossing the Chasm, Zero to One, Read Write Own, and the associated required founder reading material. Yet time and again we fall into chasms of our own design.
The pattern repeats every cycle.
The most prevalent and persistent example of this phenomenon is the Bitcoin Maximalist. Someone who was so early to crypto that, if they are still holding even a modest portion of their original portfolio in $BTC, now has access to life-changing capital. Many a Maxi holds the posture of ostensible financial genius and futurist—someone with such divine foresight as to have found the holy grail of all assets before the masses. In reality, they are just guys who were buying drugs on the Silk Road and forgot they left a paper wallet in their junk drawer for a few years.
The irony lies in the fact that these individuals are often the least accepting of new primitives emerging from the still-nascent and experimental cryptosphere.
Each cycle generates a new version of these myopicists, entrenched in their version of the aspirational and idealized financial future they were born into. We lovingly distinguish them by class, a la academia.
The Class of 2021 was brought up on the belief in a non-fungible future. Trading hashes representative of links to pictures of monkeys as the future of intellectual property, gaming, and even the substrate of the metaverse. To this day, those same bagholders believe in a second renaissance that will bring value back to their profile pictures and prove the naysayers (i.e., anyone with a double-digit IQ or higher) wrong.
Hence, their aversion to adopt this cycle's version of NFTs (memecoins) was forever calcified in petrified stone.
So the story goes: ICO lads refused to ape into DeFi protocols, DeFi chads couldn't accept NFTs, NFT kiddies couldn't grasp memecoins, and so forth.
In resounding analogy with this phenomenon is that of the CT (Crypto Twitter) degen. These are people whose livelihoods are in many ways tied to the success of decentralized networks.
Yet they refuse to use one.
Recently, I've witnessed visceral hatred of such networks like Farcaster for no reason other than, "I'm already on X."
Farcaster is a social network (read: Twitter Clone) built on top of decentralized ledger technology and blockchain. One that offers an embedded wallet and enables access to a variety of native financial primitives and mini apps that are almost exclusively crypto-centric. A network that, for the ideologues, allows you to commute your identity to any other platform that integrates the network. Platforms that now include Zapper and Coinbase, no less.
Not to mention the far more democratized monetization system that rivals X's dwindling and seemingly unfair distribution strategy.
But yes, we must continue paying Elon Musk $10/mo. for a blue checkmark and the ability to engagement-farm 5 million impressions for a pittance.
Once again, the early adopters become the laggards.
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so smooth sharing from paragraph
🫡
You either die an early adopter or live long enough to see yourself become the laggard. This blog explores the phenomenon of crypto OGs becoming gatekeepers in a cyclical refrain.
Read the whole thing sir Love the wit Would’ve loved to hear more on why Farcaster. Seemed like you jumped to the conclusion fast Obviously you’re preaching to the choir, but I thought it was a funny read and wanted to hear more about the vision
Haha thanks for the read and the feedback. Perhaps I’ll elaborate in another piece 😁
Yeah I mean you don’t need to convince me to use Farcaster, but I liked where you were going - especially the sass