My Opinion on Crypto

I was a late teen when bitcoin started to become more than a deep web term that network news would tell us about at 11. I used to even mine bitcoin before the age of ASIC supremacy, and I have had a number of projects reach out to me via email to ask for contributions. With all of this, I am in no way a subject matter expert on crypto. This is my opinion and the nuances that follow.

What is Crypto?

Crypto is fundamentally a digital asset secured by cryptography. When we talk about chains using Proof-of-Work, the PoW isn’t the coin; it’s the labor: the consensus mechanism that creates and validates new blocks. The coin is basically the asset after the minting process. The system that handles this? That’s the blockchain, the tech backbone of the whole crypto world.

Crypto holds value beyond specific applications like NFTs, smart contracts, and decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs). The value is borderless, permissionless payments that can go from anywhere in the world to anyone else in the world (as long as the support is there).

At the core of all blockchains is the distributed ledger, which is a comprehensive, shared record of coins moving between addresses, gas fees being paid, and assets being minted. Some of these ledgers are public, while others are private (or permissioned).

A key distinction: in the early days of the crypto boom (like the 2018 bull run), the ledger was mismarketed as a drop-in replacement for traditional databases. Ledgers are engineered to never have the data they hold removed or tampered with. This guarantee is enforced by consensus: a complex, decentralized agreement process that varies from chain to chain. The two most common types are Proof-of-Work (PoW) and Proof-of-Stake (PoS).

💡 Crypto, Gaming, Web3, and so on

Gaming is where I thought crypto might shine the most. I had really high hopes for projects like Gala Games, Theta, and things like Decentraland to make something cool and new. Sadly, I feel like we were oversold and majorly under-delivered, to be honest.

Gala Games pushed a game called Mirandus that was like OSRS and Albion Online, but the players would own every piece of land, market, and everything else—so kind of like Entropia Universe, but more? I love this idea; it gives a different level of gameplay and adds more investment for long-term players. One of the issues is that when you add the element of money into anything, human nature tends to overwrite everything else. By that, I mean people see a way of making money and they exploit this new way.

That is one of the issues with all of these crypto games: the cost for everything goes up as the game grows. This raises the barrier for entry and sustainability of the player base while allowing “whales” to dictate what and how the game continues to work. Actually, I shouldn’t say everything. Junk items drop in price, but the higher-tier items go up significantly. There is a game that I can’t find or remember the name of, and it was kind of cool. You fought dungeons, got items to drop, and those items, after a certain level, were minted or at least mintable. This company was either backed by Ubisoft, or Ubisoft committed some VC funding. That was a cool idea. They butchered all of this by making a version of the item class buyable only (I think this was fixed, though).

My thought is that the idea that players could own land and work that land to allow activities and get charged a tax for using it is an awesome way to let players get more of an investment in the game than a battle pass with fake tasks that mean nothing. However, I don’t think that a blockchain is needed for this, and I think it actually gets in the way of its development. It adds an app, a tech stack, and something that more players have to learn. At the end of the day, player time—the thing we compete for—is the most valuable thing in the ecosystem; without it, the system wouldn’t be a thing. That this is a major flaw when we look at anything, to be honest.

I have thought about something like clans being an NFT token where the players have voting rights on who owns the token, and all or most of the clan tax is paid back to the stakeholders (clan members). This would also allow for an active member base to allow for a change of leadership without a reform or disband. However, I don’t think that game currency should be tied to this, and that you should take a stamp of the current holdings for that clan before payouts. That way, you’re not locking the ecosystem to the blockchain, only the representation of a body of people that can be reformed at almost any time. The trade of coins should be pegged to the worth and weight of the clan, so kind of like a stock market, but with a floor that is the minimum to form/join a clan. This allows for players to only go up and be protected from a “crash”. The goal is not to turn this into a real-life money sink or a complex system that most busy players will hate, but one that allows for a clear understanding and fair power trade.

You could take this idea further by allowing for players to buy and sell shares of npc own things like companies or even towns. That have taxes, and then pay some of those taxes back to the shareholders. The key would be to make a very simple process. Like “I bought a or 100 shares of ex town, they can going to pay me x% of coins every x time.” Again the point isn’t to replace real life. You would have to add something that doesn’t let a few players take over all the shares or monopolize the market.

Crypto should have no place in offline games, or even co-op games for that matter¹, unless it’s for something cosmetic like an NFT player profile picture.

One of the goals is to not lock the ecosystem to gas fees or something similar. The last thing I want is for my items or actions to not count because I didn’t have the gas fees for them. This has happened before, and I logged out of the game and removed it. I didn’t have the time to go through something like Coinbase or Crypto.com, add money, buy whatever currency, send that currency to the wallet, and then play the game. And that game uses a token, so I’d have to trade my ETH or something for a token that is only good for that game and is on a sketchy swap. This adds more of a headache to a game than anything. It’s microtransactions with more steps.

☁️ Dplatforms: The Reliability Problem

The Theta network, and dplatforms like it, operate outside the gaming sphere, focusing on decentralized compute and data delivery. This pivot presents a unique set of challenges distinct from the Web3 gaming failures.

I find these platforms interesting, and I see genuine potential for them to mature into a profitable decentralized utility. I can envision a future where individuals build ‘micro-farms’ using single GPU servers on networks like Golem to provide paid computational power for AI or rendering tasks². The broader vision—individuals turning garages into ‘macro-datacenters’ for supplemental income—is a compelling prospect for the decentralized economy of the 2030s.

The immediate hurdle for adoption is a fundamental imbalance: currently, if you examine Theta’s edge nodes, the volume of available nodes drastically outweighs the volume of actual work. This can be interpreted in two ways: either the platform is rapidly growing and is still in its ’early stage’ of work acquisition, or the project is nearing its end-of-life without a sufficient customer base. Given that crypto platforms lack traditional operational transparency, this ambiguity makes long-term viability assessment difficult.

The most significant structural issue is the lack of guaranteed ‘always-on’ systems. Betting a company’s critical backend operations on a decentralized, crowd-sourced infrastructure introduces a level of uncontrollable risk that major enterprises (even those backing the project, like Google) are simply unwilling to accept.

These platforms seek to cheapen the cost of running services—the attempt to provide the performance of something like YouTube without the requisite datacenter cost. Ultimately, the model relies on leveraging underutilized consumer compute power to deliver cheaper services. The primary question is whether this cost saving justifies the trade-off in guaranteed uptime and reliability..

🛑 My Closing Thoughts

Crypto has its place, particularly as an alternative to payment systems like PayPal. I do not believe ‘blockchain-powered’ (or ‘AI-powered’) will ever be more than a buzzword, a signal to buy into the latest scam or mismarketed tings.

The technology offers the ability for borderless payments, yet securing an implementation is more difficult than ever before³. For nations dealing with currency instability, crypto provides a tool to mitigate risk and enable the growth of more stable, internationally connected companies⁴.

Ultimately, while the hype cycles move on to NFTs, AI, and other emerging technologies, it is crucial that we do not forget the true core of crypto: the borderless, permissionless transfer of value. If the current deployment doesn’t serve that function, it is likely just another complex database trying to solve a problem it was never designed for.