Did crypto reshape the world? Not really. But I do believe that with each cycle it draws more and more people into its orbit and changes the way that people think about the nature of money and the exchange of value.
Yes, crypto was mostly hype and a bubble that burst, again. But NFTs changed something in society, the words and concepts of Web3 and the metaverse still remain in the zeitgeist, government regulation of digitally native currency has finally begun to be taken seriously after FTX. Bitcoin may not be worth 100k but it yet again proved itself to be reliable and stable in the face of unbelievable volatility. In a sense crypto died in the summer of 2021. But it also proved it probably can’t be killed.
So why does any of this matter? It matters because bitcoin is a novel monetary technology that exists not at the nation state layer of the world, but at the information technology layer. It is a novel monetary technology that is slowly getting better, more sophisticated, more frictionless and more robust every year. And the longer it survives the more it encourages people to ask the question “what is money?” and this is a profound question that is worth grappling with individually and collectively.
For now at least, Bitcoin is global monetary infrastructure that does not rely on the blessing of the most powerful institution on earth (the US Treasury) to transfer value. There is something deeply sexy and truly cyberpunk about that.