Observations About Today's Crypto Bull Market

They say that a market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent. And while by no means, I consider myself a crypto bull - the solvency of against-the-market bettors surely is uncertain right now.

Rationality has rage quit the game, and so here we are. But actually, I wanna keep this short and focused. I just want to journal the observations of these days' market sentiment for posterity.

The following are original observations of the cryptosphere in the today's "late-stage" bull market. They're original, as they significantly differ from the observations I made in, e.g., the last late-stage bull market in crypto in 2018. By no means is this list exhaustive:

• The bull market has lasted so long that certain bullshit qualities and behavior now managed to persist into the sphere's "culture" without market participants being aware. Whole projects are founded on hot air but faithful in their belief that the hype train will eventually come to pick them up.
• External spectators, e.g., commentators of Hacker News, have stopped being capable of differentiating between the space's former quality projects and today's bullshit. They (rightfully?) equate all of crypto to a big scam or ponzi, and their tone has turned particularly aggressive and unforgiving.
• Genuine present-day innovation is being undervalued compared to speculative future results. I have colleagues complain that all their community wants is tokens when, in fact, they're shipping game-changing innovation.
• Some of the space's newcomers that I meet are so deluded and confused that any non-hype-based narrative slips past them. Will there be a lost generation of crypto devs?
• Generally, any non-hype-based and crypto-mainstream-leaning idea gets left unnoticed while repeating the 0815-formula gets particular wide-ranging praise. Does your project even exist without launching an ERC20 token?
• A degree of thought-synchronization has taken place that discriminates originality and evangelizes the one way of doing things.
• Numerous long-standing contributors that I have known to be true believers over many years have started turning sour and cynical. Some have become openly and/or cloaked opponents/critics.
• For everyone, including experts in the field, it continues to become more challenging to separate noise from signal.
• It has become ludicrously easy to raise money with no strings attached to build any type of software. It's great, but it doesn't feel real.

And that's all. I hope you can appreciate this different type of blogging too.

published 2021-11-30 by timdaub