barriers to entry through reliance on a poorly regulated asset class may lend itself as a legitimate criticism of projects associating themselves with bitcoin.*
I regularly call into question the utility of altcoin projects aside from as a mechanism for the creators/early investors to extract wealth from their audience. When investors or entrepreneurs come to bitcoin brunch and tell me about their pet project I often find myself asking:
-Why decentralize the service?
-Why connect it to a blockchain?
-Why use an altcoin rather than strictly denominating your finances in dollars?
In most cases no sufficient answer exists. These projects use decentralized blockchain altcoins to capture the momentum of contemporary economic trends. In the greedy path to self-enrichment, entrepreneurs desperately seek out any edge to help them raise money, as if the qualities of their actual business idea can't cut it. Maybe they can't, and in that case maybe they shouldn't these ideas as they currenty exist!
Why don't we demand of ourselves a higher standard--a greater vision for the future than those which repackage the very corruption we so desperately seek to escape? Or should we accept roles no better than those of cut-throats and back-room dealers?
You can only see so many project pitches before noticing most have little more to offer than good marketing and public relations. And when they do, the association with decentralized blockchain altcoins distracts from the purpose of the project idea. I find little middle ground.
This criticism applies as much to altcoiners as to bitcoiners, who often think themselves immune from the propensity to shill, while publicly advocating cults of personality and counter-cultural sectarianism. If the love of money is the root of all evils, what should you expect when you hold money more dear than all else in your world? The shills will trick you like anyone else.
Don't take me as having written this all to discourage you from pursuing wealth and prosperity, but rather to encourage creativity and the cultivation of ethics in your pursuits--to strive to do more than we ever believed we could because we never had the power to do as much as we do right now. We deserve that world, but only if we build it.