BREAKDOWN: Why We Should Stop Thinking of ‘Crypto’ as a Single Industry
CoinDesk Podcast Network
CoinDesk
4.8 • 689 Ratings
🗓️ 20 February 2020
⏱️ 16 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The ‘crypto’ industry is having a hard time fitting everything that’s happening inside that one monolithic term. On this episode, @nlw looks at current news stories from across at least 5 different categories - DeFi, enterprise blockchain, central bank digital currencies, digital collectibles and bitcoin - to ask whether they really all belong lumped in in the same category.
The episode also looks at:
- Four reasons these increasingly different categories remain bunched together
- Why turning other parts of the industry into an enemy is rewarded in the public sphere
- Why letting individual parts of the industry evolve individually is likely to bring more, not fewer resources into the space.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome back to The Breakdown, an everyday analysis breaking down the most important stories in Bitcoin, crypto, and beyond, with your host, NLW. |
| 0:15.0 | The Breakdown is distributed by CoinDesk. |
| 0:24.5 | Okay. by CoinDesk. Welcome back to the breakdown. |
| 0:26.9 | It's Thursday, February 20th, and today we are doing something a little bit different. |
| 0:31.7 | We're going to look through the news, but in the context of a larger overarching idea, |
| 0:41.5 | which is that crypto is not a single industry. |
| 0:48.6 | When we discuss this crypto industry or the blockchain space or whatever you want to call it, |
| 0:55.9 | we often speak about it in very monolithic terms, as though everything is a part of the same ecosystem. And arguably, for a long time, that has been the case. However, the more that the industry matures, |
| 1:03.5 | the less realistic it is to lump everything together. And so today I want to look through the |
| 1:09.4 | news and discover that there are really |
| 1:11.2 | at least five different subcategories that we could be discussing things in. And I want to talk a |
| 1:17.0 | little bit about why it might matter for us to start having a better differentiation. So that's |
| 1:22.6 | the theme of the day, why crypto is not a single industry. All right, so let's look at our first category of news. |
| 1:30.9 | Well, we are still trying to fully come to grips with understanding what happened with |
| 1:36.4 | these BZX attacks earlier this week. |
| 1:39.0 | And at this point, it's not so much about BZX, it's not so much about the particular |
| 1:43.2 | amounts lost, it is about |
| 1:44.9 | understanding new risk profiles in Defi. In many ways, the conversation that I've seen has been |
| 1:51.5 | a coming of adversarial thinking to Defi. Now, adversarial thinking is something that's |
| 1:57.7 | very intrinsic at this point to the Bitcoin community, where people |
| 2:01.3 | within the community who wanted to succeed are constantly asking what could go wrong? How could |
| 2:06.5 | people attack this? What do we do if that happens? I mean, even today in the Bitcoin community, |
... |
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