Over 80% of the failed Silicone Valley Bank depositors are involved in crypto startups. When fear set in, SVB depositors lined up to get US dollars out. The main reason being is that wealth from dollar purchases of crypto coins was stored at Silicone Valley Bank in US dollars. The message was clear. Even leaders in the crypto space are saying the dollar is wealth and crypto is whatever you want it to be. Yes, SVB ran out of cash. Cash that purchases crypto and finances the company. If crypto had value nobody would have cared much about SVB failing. Further more, during the SVB crash, there were no concerns about a run on crypto platforms. Telling indeed.

The failure of crypto is that tech entrepreneurs keep re-inventing its utility. It is self-defeating when looking for wide adoption of a product among the masses. Sleight of hand is not going to help. People sense when a monetary unit does not have intrinsic value and is incapable of storing wealth. This is how crypto cash is viewed by the public today. 

It is not all a waste of effort, however. Continuously re-inventing the utility of crypto is great for crypto startups' early and late investor cycles. The cycle will continue onto perpetuity and business will be great while profits continue to be measured in US dollars.

But Bitcoin is gold I tell you! The intrinsic value of an ounce of gold is precisely that. Whatever value the masses assign to one ounce of gold. It is physical, not abstract and all can participate on the same level, hence it has intrinsic value. Bitcoin has novelty which stems from its limited production. So Bitcoin is much like an NFT that has art value to the tune of thousands of US dollars. To continue the discussion, one ounce of gold could be divided into half an ounce. One Bitcoin is a unique combination of hash and nonce on a blockchain. Impossible that a fraction of a Bitcoin can exist. But yet it does. It does so because the tech industry arbitrarily re-invents utility as the masses continue to reject the monetary model.

Crypto needs intrinsic value. Crypto will need to be backed by gold or some commodity to be accepted as currency. Then again, if gold comes back the dollar and crypto will have competition which is not a desired outcome for Silicon Valley. So, unlikely crypto payment is worth the capital investment organizations need to become early pioneers. The blockchain however does have utility in terms of transactions. I would consider moving some business operations onto a Web 3 platform, but not payments.

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