You’ve probably heard of the technological adoption curve where a technology — despite how innovative and useful it might be — will not be successful unless it can be widely adopted. Wide adoption entails

(a) real utility,
(b) easy use and access, and
(c) great marketing.

If we look at cryptocurrency, at the time of writing it really only meets criterion (c). It had great positive marketing in the run-up to 2022 when moonshots featured as the fanfare for the financial layperson’s dream. And if any press is good press, then in 2022 with the collapse of Terra, FTX, and company, then the marketing roll continued.

So what about the other two criteria? Well, let’s delve a bit deeper.

Real Utility

Let’s not confuse utility with financial utility, which essentially means money to do things, buy things, speculate on things, etc. There is a longer story as to why financial utility is not real utility. In part, it stems from the distinction noted by Adam Smith and Karl Marx relating to exchange and use values. Would you rather have a gallon of water or its equivalent in cash in a barren desert?

Sure, financial utility means you can do things with money, yet Marx's point is that money is always parasitic on real utility. Without things like hammers, houses, cars, etc. there's nothing for which money can facilitate trading. In fact, historically trading didn't originally rely on currency or even a barter system. It relied, as Henry George and David Graeber point out, on a system of honor and credit.

In short, financial utility tends to refer to the application of money to invest and speculate. Not always, but this is how it tends to be represented. In contrast, real utility is all about human capacity to live life well. Not just sustenance, but the quality of life.

On this front, crypto has been pretty poor. Its libertarian proponents bark on about “financial freedom” but what crypto should really be doing is empowering users to do more, not just make money under the radar of authorities.

An easy way to see this distinction:

Financial empowerment is about enabling and facilitating your immediate and long-term goals and actions. Sure, making money might be one of your goals, but to do this, you’ll have to engage in some work. In contrast, the banner of financial freedom tends to reduce to the idea that you can take your money and speculate on some asset in order to make a profit without work.

Hey, it’s a great idea. But if everyone were to be focused on that, who would work?

Only those who had to. And that equates to chattel or wage slavery!

So, looking ahead, cryptocurrencies have to support native platforms that provide real utility. Imagine an AI protocol which allowed you to access any AI task you needed—graphics processing, computation, etc. Because of the Web3 distributed network, the depth and degree of compute power is immense. You don’t have to rely on one server, but can call on a distrbuted network of hundreds or thousands of computers to process your request!

Other aspects of real utility include distributed systems where the middleman is cut out, making any system more efficient in terms of cost. Do you need banks or realtors? Time and the blockchain will tell . . .

Easy Access and Use

I won’t say much more on this except that with any new technology, there are growing pains. One may not quite understand what’s meant by "NFT", "Web3", or "blockchain", but the idea is that such technology becomes so seamless that one doesn’t even need to refer to those names. You just use the system or network.

(If you’re a philosopher, that’s a Heideggerian point about use and disappearance! You don’t notice the glasses you need when reading.)

Crypto is far from this stage. It will happen. But for now, most projects getting “on chain” will probably be a hybrid of Web2 and Web3 — or Web 5.

As a user, you don’t need to fret. Good projects will make it such that you can use their platform without even noticing you’re on-chain!

Make it so!

About the Author

Todd Mei is the lead researcher and writer for 1.2 Labs, which is the consultancy group for the crypto hedge fund 1.2 Capital. He is a former Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Kent (UK), with specialisms in philosophy of economics, meaningful work, ethics, hermeneutics, and existentialism. His aim is to help innovative projects get on-chain in order to provide real utility to the world.

Credits
Photo by Glen Carrie on Unsplash.
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