If I were to ask you the question right now “Are you having fun?”, you could answer almost definitively with a yes or no answer. But if I asked you how much fun you were having, that might be a little more challenging. Without doing a spinal tap to measure the amount of dopamine being released into the brain, it’s very difficult to verbalize some type of measurement in comparison to the sense of “fun”.
As human beings, we have greatly altered our sense of “fun” over a few millennia. What was once a feeling of reward/motivation for completing simple survival tactics has now become a wide array of choices to achieve that dopamine rush. Imagination came as a result of community and providing simple life necessities for others. We no longer had to spend a majority of our day focusing on our next meal or finding shelter to survive the night ahead. We started to invent games and activities to produce that same type of feeling but with less consequences to life or death.
Fast forward to today and past a few wars and revolutions, you’ll find that our imagination has spawned some very sophisticated forms of fun. Casinos, video games, board games tend to address the immediate dopamine fix. RPG games like Dungeons and Dragons can take something as simple as hanging out with friends and add a sense of adventure and imagination that might not otherwise exist. Even activities like Geocaching can turn a simple nature walk into a fun activity full of rewards and achievements.
So let’s go back to the original question. Can you quantify fun?
You could verbalize that you completed a certain number of rounds in a video game. Or describe a scenario on a board game. You could even give a play by play on a D&D adventure. But even if you could verbalize it in such a fashion, would others be able to share in the same sense of fun what you describe?
That’s where cryptocurrency comes into play.
Crypto has taken even the most basic of tasks and given it a remarkable value in the form of mining. Apps like COIN can take a simple drive and turn it into a multifaceted experience of both enjoying the trip as well as monetary gain. There are some apps where you can simply scan a receipt or purchase through Amazon and get a crypto reward as a result. Describing these as activities with monetary gain can help others share in the same feeling of accomplishment with another person. Even the feeling of watching the overall price rise and drop day to day can be fun because it’s so unpredictable (as long as you’re doing so responsibly by the way. A huge price drop on your life savings has had detrimental effects on others that we will talk about soon).
So why is it that crypto can create such an experience where FIAT can’t? I’m not saying that you can’t with FIAT. A simple coin pusher game can give a similar dopamine fix as a casino game but there is more at stake with these. But FIAT has a definitive value. A dollar will always be a dollar, a quarter always a quarter, etc. Yet for $50-$100 of ETH, you can create your own ERC-20 token to use in your own app or project.
The problem is that there is no inherent value in these until others can jump into a similar bandwagon. One single crypto coin doesn’t have value unless others can share a similar valuation. If people stopped buying or selling Bitcoin at the same time, that value will diminish quickly. Yet we continue to find new projects and whitepapers to relate to and in turn want to invest our time and resources into making these things work.
Which goes back to the imagination that I mentioned earlier. Comments recently in the headlines have mentioned crypto being imaginary. But the reality is this. Is crypto any different than the balance you see on the screen at an ATM? It’s still data, no matter what. But FIAT can be backed by treasury departments, banks, FDIC and others. It has a limited value that is very stable and fixed.
But crypto has unlimited potential, bound simply by our imagination. If we are able to achieve that utopian idea of DeFi, who knows where our imagination might take us.
