There's a lot of talk these days about the enshitification of the Internet. What I rarely see mentioned is that the Internet's first steps towards enshitification started when we attached the banking system to the Internet.

Before you could make transactions online, if your infrastructure was hacked, it was your fault and your responsibility to implement better security. But once money was involved, you could complain to the police about a hack and involve the authorities - because now actual property was involved. This changed everything.

This was also about the time we started seeing spam, scams, and other negativity suddenly spring up. It's hard to believe that we used to post to usenet with our email addresses publicly exposed... and never worry about being added to a spam list.

Money attracted bad actors to the Internet. Bitcoin was money from the start. So of course the whole cryptocurrency scene is a magnet for bad actors - like we've never seen before. This was inevitable. And 95% of the cryptocurrency scene are some flavor of bad actors.

But Bitcoin mostly sits outside of the legal frameworks of the world. So it's much harder to call the authorities when your cryptocurrency is stolen. You can. It happens. But not much. And for this reason, the only path forward for this new technology/money is right through the middle of the hoard of bad actors. That means we have to create technological and social solutions for security instead of relying on the monopoly of violence (the police) to protect us.

The bad acts and just general greed in the scene are holding it back. But this is, unfortunately, necessary. This is a wall of resistance that has to be pushed through for a better tomorrow. It's part of the process.

The future that decentralized technology will bring us will be different from whatever we are imagining now. But we still have to keep imagining and building. Because even though it will be different than the fantasy, its still the right direction.