As the price plummets day by day, a lot of so called "crypto-enthusiasts" are throwing the towel, and defect into the camp of nocoiners. People who probably put life savings into Bitcoin at 19k, or just guys who saw that interspersing expressions like "when moon?", "decentralization" and "hash power" got them an audience at parties.

Apart from shaking out weak hands, this price drop has a surprising side effect: it puts a strong, and, to be honest, almost cruel, spotlight on some of the people who praised themselves, until recently, as being a part of the "wave of change".

And truth is, a lot of these people are not that much interested into the "wave of change", into "decentralization" as they are interested in the good ol' "money for nothing, and the chicks for free". They're not so much the "digital hippies" they are advertising themselves as, but just simple speculators.

Don't get me wrong, there's nothing wrong with being a speculator, in my opinion, as long as you understand the job requirements. As long as you understand what is a risk / reward ratio and as long as you are ready to lose your entire bet if you misjudged your odds. But if you call yourself a speculator because you know how to spell "bitcoin" and "blockchain", I'm sorry, but this one is on you. And it's a big one.

Being "into crypto" means a lot more than checking the price 10 times a day, looking for an entry point to sell or buy, and praising overnight "crypto specialists" in social media. The price component is important and I'm not playing it down. But it's just one piece of the entire puzzle.

The crypto revolution improved, in my opinion, only a few parts of the economical process (which is, and it will always be, just an exchange of goods between parties).

One of these is "shortening the path" between investment and profit. Tokenization of startups (including its rather horrific ICO era) made it easier for investors to participate in the profits of a successful startup. Please note these two words: "profits" and "successful". Which means that startups should be able to generate profits (a thing that, for instance, Amazon didn't do for almost a decade) and to have a successful product. A real product, used and promoted. Not just a story, not just a white paper, not just an announcement of the "next revolutionary platform that will change the way we do business". The profit part and the product part are still required. And that's why you need patience when you invest crypto into a startup.

Another change is the "vote weighing" part. It's somehow related to the part above, but it's more "political". Blockchain, as a technology, makes the propagation of opinions faster and more reliable. Polls are bound to be fast and true. And if you combine this with the participation, as stakeholders, in a startup or in a community, you get a fantastic result: an unprecedented propagation of ideas and decisions. But that speed doesn't necessarily mean there is (or there should be) any economical value on the underlying tokens of the network. It just means that us, as communities, can talk faster, clearer and in a more honest way. That may lead to some economic changes, but again, expect those to be slow and hairy.

And the last change that "the crypto revolution" brought is so boring that it gets almost unnoticed: the 100% uptime and immutable database that a decentralized blockchain provides. You may take this for granted, but, as a person who saw the internet being born, I can tell you this is a huge advancement, one that didn't yet yield its true profit. I don't know how it will yield its profit, by the way, but I know that maintaining a globally distributed database, with 100% uptime and immutable records costs a fortune. You may not see this yet, because you may be focusing on the trading part, but it's there and it already creates interesting projects.

So, what exactly means "being into crypto"?

In my opinion it means understanding that real projects take time to identify a need and find the best way to fulfill it. A real business goes through many stages and has to overcome many failures. Defecting at the first signs of loss never helps.

Being into crypto also means there's a lot less hype than the media is making it look like. Yes, blockchain is a revolutionary technology, but the base bricks were around for decades (peer to peer computing is around since the seventies and "nonces" were used first in github, if you really want to know).

It's what we build on top of the blockchain that generates (or it should generate) value.

Back to reality. Here comes gravity.

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I'm a serial entrepreneur, blogger and ultrarunner. You can find me mainly on my blog at Dragos Roua where I write about productivity, business, relationships and running. Here on Steemit you may stay updated by following me @dragosroua.

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