Time to look past Bitcoin

I just returned from a longly awaited trip to Italy. After almost 3 years I managed to go back to visit my family and friends. And after nearly 2 decades spent abroad, it is always fascinating going back “home” and find out that everything seems changed, while nothing much has actually changed. That is why I use the inverted commas for “home”. I am proud of being Italian, but the sense of stagnation when it comes to innovation is quite palpable.

Moreover, I almost invariably find my friends working at the same company, on the same job, with the same ambitions. I love them the way they are, but it is at times hard to have a conversation on some of the latest developments that are changing the world. Throughout the time of my holiday, the LUNA / TERRA situation unfolded, creating one of the largest crypto disasters ever, yet there was no coverage about it on any mainstream media for a week. Finally, at the tail of a news report on finance, there was a mere 10 seconds mention of the crypto market collapsing.

Since 2016 I have been advocating — and at times criticising — the importance of tech development finalised towards affordable global payment systems as well as distributed ledgers able to dis-intermediate entire industries. I cannot say that I was involved from the beginning, but by 2022 I am considered an early adopter. And what I have seen, is the rise and fall of ideas, such as Initial Coin Offering, and witnessed the compound growth of what “learning from failure” looks like in technology. The concept of Decentralised Finance — or DeFi in short — has been one of the most significant innovations of this decade, and it is just the beginning. Yet, I also realise how getting to understand all of this, requires will and dedication.

So it is not fully a surprise to me, that while I was in Italy, every time I mentioned that I worked in blockchain and cryptocurrencies, the most common comment was inevitably: “Ah! Bitcoin!”. And even more worrying, in some cases, someone replied to me that they were offered an investment in a blockchain project. But then, upon further investigation, they were referring to a ponzi scheme with some sort of metaverse in the middle of it. Hyper, Ultra, Mega, etcetera... all sort of suffix before Verse to make it sound like the latest innovation, while at the core of it, when they said investment, they truly meant the onboarding fee in a Multi Level Marketing company with no products to sell.

It is truly saddening to see the industry being so poorly represented in a country like Italy, where innovation thrived for decades and still does around more traditional industries. But if I stop criticising my own country, I realise that this type of mindset is broadly present around the world.

Too many people see cryptocurrencies just as a way to make money quickly, instead of understanding the solutions that distributed ledgers are bringing to the world to solve the very problems that traditional systems have tried to solve. Whenever an innovation is tested, even when it fails, leaves behind breadcrumbs of success that will eventually become the everyday solutions we will be using in many aspects of our life.