via negativa

[First published on Cent]

Bear markets are about cleaning the slate. All the excess, all the fakes and phonies are exposed and removed. In that way bear markets act via negativa - they act by removing.

And boy is crypto in a bear market.

While a lot of personalities and projects have gone radio silent - with more sure to follow - more and more naysayers and critics seem to be popping up, letting us know how foolish we were.

To take one example let's look at “The Blockchain Is a Reminder of the Internet’s Failure” a Medium piece by Andrew Leonard, one of the earliest writers and chroniclers of the early internet back in the 1990s.

It's actually an interesting article. Essentially Andrew wants to dissolve the utopian promises and pie-in-the-sky language that have dominated a lot of the conversations about crypto until now. Why? Because he's reminded of the same promises he heard (and believed) during the internet's early heyday which ended up crashing in spectacular fashion.

But even Andrew admits that blockchain tech, after dissolving the false promises and naive proclamations that surround it, will then probably lead to the appearance of "some useful applications that make [his] life more convenient and don’t break the planet."

I believe the applications he's speaking of are the web3 cousins of Amazon, Google and PayPal which arose out of the rubble of the dotcom crash, of which Cent is as strong a candidate as any to become one of the applications that will have a major impact on not just his life, but many others.

Towards the end of the piece Andrew writes:

"Instead of seeking out the anomie of decentralization, we need to figure out how to come together. To successfully deal with the failings of humanity, we have to spend more time with humans and less time thumbing our smartphones."

First of all, is it me or does that language sound very similar to the idealistic language of crypto evangelists that he was criticizing in the first place?

But more than that, his desire for humanity to "be able to come together" and "spend more time with [other] humans" reminded me of how much I've actually interacted with and gotten to know quite a few other incredibly like minded and thoughtful people on Cent.

Having long extended texting sessions or phone calls with people you meet on the internet isn't supposed to be common. But on Cent it seems to be increasingly common - which is both awesome and something I hope Andrew notices. But to Andrew's main point, that phenomenon isn't *due to* crypto; it's simply made possible *by* crypto.

That's a subtle but powerful distinction that only becomes clear it one removes the pink tinted lenses of idealism. So it's in that light that we can begin to see the main benefit of bear markets acting via negativa - that from a subtraction, a positive reaction is stimulated.