Have a look back at ~2014 or so. HN was extremely bullish on Bitcoin. It sometimes took up about a quarter of the articles at any given time. It promised a bright new decentralized world and offered fertile ground for innovation. It promised to free up peer-to-peer transfers, allow some measure of anonymity in financial transactions, and perhaps even become the vehicle for microtransactions that the world so sorely needs.

Today, it is far less clear that there is something new at hand. To the extent that blockchains enable innovation, the early wins are complete and the strengths and weaknesses of the entire ecosystem largely have become clear.

In 2014, it was rather clear that blockchains had some sort of substantial potential value, something competitive with the total amount of money circulating in the world. In 2022, cryptocurrency is worth that much. Bitcoin alone is "worth" perhaps a trillion dollars, while M1 is around 20 trillion.

What we're seeing today is a lack of clarity and direction. HN was stoked on crypto when it offered something new. Today, crypto offers a lot of pump-and-dump schemes and financial curiosities, but nothing like the promise and obvious direction it held in 2014.

Something cool and new may yet emerge -- expect HN to get real excited when it does happen.