Imagine There’s No Crypto. It’s Too Easy If You Try

Imagine There’s No Crypto. It’s Too Easy If You Try

Crypto is seemingly everywhere in 2022. The total market cap of all cryptocurrencies is still above $2 trillion despite some recent losses. In 2021, people spent more than $44 billion on non-fungible tokens, or virtual ownership rights on digital objects — an amount that approached the total size of global art and antique sales in 2020. The notion of “Web 3.0” has firmly attached itself to crypto in the past year or so.

And yet, 13 years after the first Bitcoin was mined, I can’t help thinking that not much would change for the vast majority of us if we woke up one morning and found that the entire crypto phenomenon had disappeared forever.

Imagine the web — still Web 1.0 at that point, when Facebook was still called The Facebook — disappearing in 2004, 13 years after Tim Berners-Lee released his World Wide Web browser to the wider public. Even then, before YouTube (2005) and Netflix streaming (2007), no more internet would have been a major shock, a huge loss: No more Google? No Wikipedia? No Skype?

No more crypto in 2022, though? Meh, unless you’re one of the millennial millionaires with more than 50% of their assets in cryptocurrencies.

One could pick