Author: hitesh.eth
Translation: TechFlow
Since the birth of cryptocurrency, it has always been based on altruism. The early users of any crypto-based products were not in it for the money. In fact, they were happy to provide resources for early crypto networks like BitTorrent, thereby helping a vast community.
In those days, before OTT (streaming platforms) became popular, it was extremely difficult to watch a high-quality movie online—a common problem worldwide. We had to wait for months until TV stations broadcast them to see movies we couldn’t watch in theaters every weekend.
Movie culture has always been growing and evolving; I believe it’s the only culture that continuously attracts more and more people. Those drawn in by movie culture tend to stay for a long time, and cryptocurrency has played a role in this process. It has enabled more people globally to join in through the internet, making movie culture more inclusive and diverse.
Many people provided movie files through their own computer systems, sharing them using seeds and peers, while we downloaded from their systems in a peer-to-peer (p2p) manner. It all felt like magic. It was free, entirely driven by a shared love for movies.
This shared sentiment of resisting centralized systems and processes, of returning power to the people, was the core spirit of those who intentionally or unintentionally participated in early crypto products.
Then, Bitcoin emerged, becoming a watershed moment in the crypto space. In Bitcoin’s early days, those who joined the network didn’t care about its price. They focused on building the network, educating more people, and driving early adoption. They even gave away Bitcoin for free via forums, offline meetups, events, and mailing lists.
In 2009 and 2010, thousands of Bitcoin were given away for free, and at that time, Bitcoin had no real market value. But with the emergence of exchanges, Bitcoin became tradable and gradually acquired market value. This changed everything. The spirit of altruism began to take a back seat, while fear and greed quietly seeped in, gradually polluting the network’s consciousness.
Events like Mt. Gox, Bitconnect, and OneCoin became classic cases, where malicious actors extracted millions of Bitcoin from ordinary people who held dreams and hope. We always thought we were early participants in the game. Actually, we weren’t, brother.
In fact, we were too late, even later than those driving taxis in remote corners, with big smiles on their faces, yet losing 10 Bitcoin to the Bitconnect scam. These were the real early participants. They believed in Bitcoin but never truly understood its significance.
Perhaps, once money became tied to cryptocurrency, everything changed. Those who decided to build the crypto market after 2012 set “profiting from information asymmetry” as the new agenda. They achieved great success in the market, especially in 2017, when hundreds of tokens were traded on a handful of exchanges. This also led to the rise of many new projects, with over 500 tokens entering the market. Project teams raised large amounts of funds. However, most tokens never got proper listing opportunities, and almost all related tokens eventually disappeared within three years.
But when these projects were hot, people thought they would change the world. Everyone believed in these ideas, not realizing that the infrastructure was simply not ready. Some who truly cared kept warning others, but no one wanted to listen. All they saw were stories of others making money and sharing their success online, and that was enough to make them believe crypto would change their lives. They believed, and thus lost. And the bad actors succeeded again. Some even managed to disguise themselves as “good people” and are still operating at higher positions today.
The New Face of Crypto
Crypto tokens have become strings of promised data with limited supply, with project teams controlling their distribution. Project teams release token supply into the market slowly and deliberately, partially distributing them to create artificial demand, then design incentive mechanisms to attract early participants, binding their identities and reputations to the tokens.
These incentives are not just economic, but also psychological triggers, designed to spark belief, tribalism, and FOMO (fear of missing out). The real product is not the token, but the illusion. The narratives built around these data strings are not only false but also carefully emotionally manipulated. The target is always the “reactive mind” stuck in survival cycles—millions seeking meaning and longing for faith.
Once you tap into this mindset, you don’t even need evidence, just a story, a symbol that appears to be the “last chance.” The human mind, conditioned by decades of scarcity, shame, or missed opportunities, will cling tightly to these narratives. And those behind these data strings know this all too well. What they sell is not a product, but hope—hope dressed up in numbers, trends, and community jargon. They skillfully exploit information asymmetry, because hope is the easiest drug to sell and the hardest to quit.
What we’re seeing isn’t new, it’s just happening faster. The concentration of wealth has always depended on this asymmetry. A few know the rules of the game, while the majority hold onto dreams. But in the world of tokens, belief spreads much faster than reflection. Victims don’t even have time to pause and think, because the next promise has already appeared—shiny, hot, full of potential, and just credible enough, like a hope for redemption.
The Truth of Extraction
We’ve reached a stage where we feel cheated, but can’t accept the fact. For new entrants to the market, hope is still visible; but for veterans who have experienced two or three market cycles, they can’t even digest the current market structure. This is something they can’t truly accept. They can’t keep up with changing narratives, can’t track the rapid operation of catalysts, and can’t act quickly, because they’re still stuck in the simpler market concepts of the past.
But if you think deeply, the market has never been “simple” or “complex”—it’s all about scale. In the past, an “extractor” faced 100,000 users, but now, an “extractor” only needs to face a hundred users.
Your probability of being extracted has become extremely high. Even in the world of extractors, there is competition, so they can’t focus on one thing for too long lest they get exposed. They constantly throw new narratives into the market, stirring up excitement among participants.
People oscillate between winning and losing; some stay, some leave, but extraction never stops—instead, it keeps expanding in scale. Even if you’re caught in the extraction cycle, there will always be a window for you to exit with profits, depending on your self-discipline, risk management, and lessons learned from the past. Some smart people keep profiting by exiting at the right time, while others become “exit liquidity.” This cycle will continue, because extractors know they have only just scratched the surface of human greed.
As mainstream adoption increases, more people will get trapped. And when that happens, governments will intervene in the name of regulation to “save” us, ultimately channeling the extracted funds into their own hands through taxation.
Reflection
When you realize all this and start to reflect deeply, comparing it to the original altruistic intentions, you may not be able to hold back tears, seeing what we have done to cryptocurrency.
Once, this was something so pure, liberating, and full of hope. It showed us the possibility of alternative systems.
It was supposed to return power to us.
And now, we seem to have power, but it’s a power that has been lost.
We followed the ideals of altruism, yet handed over our peace of mind and money to the market, while some scammer hides in the corner, laughing at our stupidity.
Dreams turned into illusions, illusions evolved into extraction, and perhaps this is the real story of cryptocurrency.
