Vitalik reviews and summarizes the past 12 years, the encryption field needs to adapt to the new reality

Editor's Note: This article comes fromBabbitt Information (ID: bitcoin8btc), by Kyle, published with permission.

Editor's Note: This article comes from

Babbitt Information (ID: bitcoin8btc)

Babbitt Information (ID: bitcoin8btc)

, by Kyle, published with permission.

On June 2, Ethereum founder Vitalik Buerin shared what the 12 years from 2008 to 2020 have meant for cryptocurrencies in a series of tweets. V God believes that the field of cryptocurrency is constantly evolving and changing, and we need to carefully observe and adapt to the new reality.

Here's what Vitalik shared:

From 2008 to 2020, what did these 12 years mean for cryptocurrencies? I've said this in some of my new online sessions recently, but I wanted to share it again:

Bitcoin was essentially born out of a financial crisis. In that situation, either the banks misbehaved, or the government over/undervalued/wrongly controlled the financial sector, or they bailed out too many banks, or printed too many dollars.

Bitcoin itself is primarily a financial instrument. Ethereum is clearly less financial in nature, but even so, there remains the fact that most of the applications that blockchain improves involve dealing with some form of coins/tokens/money.

Yes, the Fed's money printing machine is indeed useless. But that's only a small part of what's going on, even if inflation is "falling" rather than rising.

Ultimately, cryptocurrencies will be highly correlated with broader economic trends. This doesn't mean that cryptocurrencies are immune to other things (such as political obstacles/interference), but *does* mean that the narrative around cryptocurrencies needs to be adjusted.

So my conclusion: Finance will become relatively less important in this decade than it has been in the past, and the cryptocurrency space needs to adapt to this reality. Even within finance, there is an orderly shift in priorities.

Fortunately, there are many kinds of Ethereum applications (and applications of other chains) not limited to the financial field. Decentralized censorship-resistant information publishing and communication, decentralized community/governance/DAO, DAO for content planning, etc. All of these are important jobs.

In terms of financial applications, I would say that the success of stablecoins shows that what people want is not to get rid of the dollar at this moment, but to enter the cryptocurrency *environment*, where they have more options to use their money.

They have the freedom to withdraw.

Financial censorship (especially insidious second-order changes, where middlemen are quietly used to thwart legitimate use cases) remains a problem for many marginalized groups, and cryptocurrencies can help.

However, I do think that we need a broad shift from "cryptocurrency as finance" to "cryptocurrency is also decentralized governance, organizations, and communities," and it's happening.