After the recent influx of questions and attention around Web3, I've decided to republish a blogpost I originally wrote about the topic on February 8, 2018.

The Year Crypto Went Mainstream

2017 was finally the year crypto went mainstream. I’ve seen a lot of musicians transition from semi-indie famous to full blown celebrities, and when I’m trying to gauge how much exposure a musician truly has, my litmus test has always been, “Do my parents know who this is, and do teenagers know who this is?” 2017 is the year that crypto passed that litmus test.

Hype vs. Reality

Unfortunately the conversation has mostly centered around the speculative price volatility due to trading, rather than the underlying technology. This is a massive red herring. While it’s true that cryptoassets will continue to develop and generate extreme amounts of wealth in the coming years, the true potential for the blockchain is 3-fold:

1. Create a sustainable structure for an open source project to be funded and nurtured throughout its development.

2. Secure your data from the bottom up by cryptographically hashing every transaction.

3. Allow for radical transparency in observing the amount of money moving throughout a system. The transactions may not have identifiable names on them, but every transaction is equally observable to every user of the system. We may never know who Satoshi is but everyone can see his coins.

It’s almost too good to be true. At the moment when our tech institutions have failed us miserably there is a grassroots movement metastasizing out of the ground to solve all of the internet’s ills. It’s like a thousand Linux projects appeared overnight. But this is only one possible future for blockchains and cryptocurrencies. We collectively decide the future through our focus and attention.