Externalities, and even large-scale adoption, such statements may trick VC guys into giving you money, but many teachers have genuinely deceived themselves.

Author: Gu He.hl

First of all, the expectations are beautiful, but the reality is harsh. Once you try it, you’ll know that you can’t attract newcomers; even a few presidents issuing tokens can’t bring in a few new users. Why do you think the broken things you developed can be used by normal people?

The so-called safe protocols have caused the largest hacking incident in the history of the industry, and if you remove "industry," it might even rank among the top cases in the entire history of human networks.

Most project teams develop products that are even worse than safe; they are just rubbish. Users in the industry generally have strong learning abilities, and they can’t even get used to it. What dreams are you selling to web2 users?

I’m not being pessimistic about the industry; you should first serve the existing users well before fantasizing about external users. In fact, it hasn’t dropped much; the greed index is already at 10, indicating extreme panic. People in the market can’t even be retained, yet you’re still eyeing the little money from outsiders.

Let’s just say, Bybit is probably the largest asset management client you can find in the industry, and they can lose money playing around, and completely can’t hold onto it, letting them lose their own money. What qualifications does such a project have to talk about externalities?

Secondly, if an industry truly has no externalities, would it collapse?

Clearly not. For example, many monopolistic enterprises can thrive even without user growth; even with negative growth, they are still vigorous. They don’t care about whether there are externalities.

Because no matter how monopolistic an industry is, it is not a closed system. Users within the industry will definitely engage in economic exchanges with the outside society.

So, does the crypto space really need more fresh blood?

Of course not. Without externalities, all that is needed is cyclical adjustments.

In a bear market, let the exhausted retail investors run some food delivery, save up some gambling capital, and after a while, they can pump the market again. When the next bull market starts, they’ll happily shout “the bull is back” and come to play again.

In other words, the participants themselves are a continuous source of “externality.”

So there’s a saying: retail investors are the best assets for exchanges.

Industries that truly need externalities are those where everyone is a practitioner, but the financial market is clearly not such an industry. Most users only occasionally gamble with spare money and do whatever else they need to do.

Currently, the only coin that truly needs large-scale adoption is BTC, after all, it has a trillion-dollar market cap, and it’s hard to move without external funds.

Finally, is introducing externalities a good thing? Not necessarily.

Without mentioning the legal risks triggered by domestic group events, another key point is that the most impressive aspect of the crypto space right now is its user average consumption capacity, which is far higher than that of other industries.

Why can @kaitoai have such an outrageous valuation with so few users? Because both WeChat and Xiaohongshu have much weaker consumption capacity than crypto Twitter. Why can @hyperliquidx achieve 1/10 of Binance’s trading volume with 1/7500 of the users?

Using a term learned from the last price analysis of Pi: user quality density—the value contribution rate (ARPU) per user determines the overall value of the user group.

People are different; this isn’t a general election where one person equals one vote. It’s a financial market; the more money you have, the more votes you get.

This is why the users of hook and TG mini-program coins are different from the elderly users of Pi; whether the data is fake or real, it doesn’t matter.

Let’s take a step back. When you really spend a lot of costs to introduce so-called externalities, what’s the result?

These people would rather spend half a month getting a bag of fruit for free, wait a month to get a glass cup, or spend a year gathering 20 yuan to withdraw, or even spend 7 years signing in every day without knowing if it will yield results, rather than spend a dime.

Because that money still needs *risk exposure to be real externality; money that doesn’t dare to go to zero isn’t money in the crypto space.

If they really felt secure putting their money in, in the end, they would just be putting all low-risk protocols down to a 0.5% annualized return, that’s it, nothing more.

It’s not that I look down on anyone; it’s just that everyone has different investment philosophies. Most people have been trained to be cogs in society, unlike Koreans who, when pushed to the limit, are very honest and instinctively resist gambling.

This group of people belongs to the industry’s liability users; they only come in to suck blood. If institutions are the sickle, then the profit-seeking crowd is the locusts. This isn’t about food delivery, ride-hailing, or online shopping, which are necessary consumption industries; bringing in ineffective users doesn’t generate benefits. Effort and diligence won’t change your project; it will only waste your marketing budget.

For the investment market, the world has only a small portion of people who have spare money to invest/gamble. Even fewer can have such a large risk exposure as crypto users, which is just a hundred or eighty thousand who buy Trump on-chain.

Most projects that aim to enlighten web2 users and make it easier for them to use web3 are unfortunately going in the wrong direction. They don’t use it not because it’s not convenient, but because they aren’t your customers in the first place.

Complex products and high learning costs are the best filters for users. Why do scammers engage in such clumsy schemes as “I’m Qin Shi Huang, send money”? Why do NFT projects like to create bizarre and ugly things? Quickly filtering target customers is the best way to concentrate consensus.

When you lure people in with value or aesthetics, the scam will eventually collapse, but when participants know that this is a game and a dream, the sweetness can actually last longer.

免责声明：本文章仅代表作者个人观点，不代表本平台的立场和观点。本文章仅供信息分享，不构成对任何人的任何投资建议。用户与作者之间的任何争议，与本平台无关。如网页中刊载的文章或图片涉及侵权，请提供相关的权利证明和身份证明发送邮件到support@aicoin.com，本平台相关工作人员将会进行核查。