Losing the Lambos: It's Time to Get Serious About Crypto's Big Questions

Rather, what I'd like to talk about is how the crypto community should use this moment to forget about price fluctuations and instead engage the world in a proper discussion about blockchain technology's potential.

What do we want cryptocurrency and blockchain technology to achieve? And embedded in that is a question about who we are.

As it stands in 2018, what does the crypto and blockchain community represent?

The blockchain community's identity is complex and multi-faceted.

During the previous bitcoin market hiatus, while bitcoin developers worked on scaling solutions amid a different kind of "Crisis" - the block size debate - a wave of non-developer newcomers started getting interested in blockchain technology: lawyers, bankers, supply-chain managers and regulators.

Many crypto developers dismiss these enterprise-driven private blockchain solutions, which typically employ pre-bitcoin consensus solutions such as practical byzantine fault tolerance and a trusted entity to administer the network, as a retrograde solution that's not censorship-resistant.

Until scaling solutions such as Lightning and sharding are working at full capability, permissionless blockchains can't introduce decentralized applications at scale with anywhere near the ease of permissioned systems, which have fewer governance and computational limitations.

In the meantime, there's a great deal of learning that we can - indeed, need - to take from how these real-world private blockchain implementations play out.

Blockchains are a complex, multifaceted social technology.

Even as a few ham-fisted regulatory solutions, such as the BitLicense, emerged and as banks undertook a clumsy, misguided attempt to co-opt "Blockchain without bitcoin," the opening of a mainstream conversation enabled sensible advocates for the technology such as Coin Center and the Chamber of Digital Commerce to establish an invaluable dialogue with policymakers and society at large.