As the title suggests, I spent the past year (pretty much from May 2022 - July-ish 2023) away from all crypto communities, including crypto subs, discord servers, etc. And here's what I found out:

We used to talk about how this sub itself is an echo chamber and all, so I kinda wanted to give y'all a sense what most people outside the crypto community think.

Disclaimer: I live in a first-world, Asian country where crypto is fairly popular (but only as an investment). Your anecdotes may and will differ. Please bear in mind that these are completely anecdotal, and that you obviously shouldn't take this as financial advice.

1. The vast majority of people don't care about crypto.

   1. Crypto still remains an "investment" rather than an actual day-to-day payment system. Even with stuff like Chainlink and XRP partnering with banks to facilitate int'l transactions, the vast majority of people are not willing to try out crypto for transactions and would rather pay a slightly higher fee for a solution that involves traditional banks**.**

   2. In fact, people outside the US are even willing to just go through the exorbitant exchange rate commissions and paypal / eTransfer someone if they're buying something from the US.

   3. And the fact that it is still perceived as an "investment" means that there is a very polarising divide between people who are in the crypto space, and people who are not. This is worrying.

   4. Even in my country, where (in the 2022 elections), candidates from both major parties were very supportive of crypto, crypto is seen more and more as a risky investment that just pull people in their 20s and 30s into a debt trap.

2. However, there are some niche markets where crypto is welcomed

   1. There were two times that I found crypto being used out in the wild, and they were both really niche but I still want to point them out.

   2. The first was in online tipping, I saw someone on Youtube doing a livestream, and they were playing really nice pieces on their ukulele and they had a Nano wallet Address as a pinned comment on the Live Stream chat. And viewers were able to request songs by tipping like 2-5 Nano to the wallet. I asked them why and they said it was because Youtube Revenue sharing wasn't allowed in their country, so they couldn't actually receive any money from their channel even though it was eligible for monetization.

   3. Next was the grey-area market. I'm not sure if this is a good thing or not, but there's a lot of discord servers all kinds of gaming account trading, in-game currency trading and etc. And the people who sell/buy these gaming accounts tend to accept only Paypal/CashApp/Crypto, Just as an FYI, the only crypto they tend to accept is LTC (for smaller transactions) and ETH (for larger ones). They tend to prefer Paypal and CashApp for smaller transactions (<100USD) too.

3. There's a significant number of people who instantly lose interest / actively distrust something when the hear the word "crypto" or even "blockchain"

   1. This is a massive deal-breaker, and a really big issue that this community needs to solve if we really want crypto to go mainstream.

   2. Because of the numerous and frequent media reports about Crypto A being a scam and Crypto B tanking 99% overnight, many people have developed an inherent distrust for anything that is mildly crypto-related.

   3. As an example, I see a lot of people on software subreddits not recommending Brave Browser just because it has a crypto feature (which can be opted out of btw).

   4. There was another like spaceflight project that was affiliated with something something crypto, and i remember people in the comments were trashing about it JUST because it was crypto-related.

   5. Similarly, another argument / statistic that I heard about this was if there are 10000 coins listed on an exchange, how many will really be alive at the end of say 5 or 10 years? In fact, many projects get hacked, devs exit scam, some just get lost to the depths of time, etc. And many don't end up surviving for more than a year. By "surviving", I mean actively used, talked about and developed for.

   6. In contrast, you can look at the stock market of any G20 country and if you ask how many companies will be alive by 2030, the answer is likely to be much closer to 80ish%, while crypto is more likely to be below 50%.

4. Except in certain developing countries, a lot of people have a lot of trust in TradFi (for investment purposes)

   1. This is a bit more time-specific, so I left this until the end. If you're viewing this however many years' time, things might have changed.

   2. Currently, a 1-year deposit of more than the equivalent to 1000USD in my country, at any random reputable bank, will give you a 4.05% interest rate (its meant to be a bit higher but I'm taking into account taxes). A slightly riskier bank gives about 5.2%. Staking ETH is like only 2-3% higher than these rates. Even at the most riskiest bank (5.4%), the government (in my country) can protect your deposit up to the equivalent of USD50k. So there's no point in putting money into crypto, which can lead to a loss in the original money put in ( you can have a net loss).

   3. In fact, a better investment strategy (that I heard from my cousin) is actually just to short Russian Rubles. He's made a net profit of about 20% over the past 1.5 years shorting the Ruble-USD ratio.

   4. Even better, my dad has bought some stocks at a Telecoms company in our country, and appr the dividends (give quarterly ) add up to an ROI of 10% in 4 quarters. The dividends for this company has not dropped by more than 5% ever since 2015.

I'm going to leave the conclusion for y'all to draw.

Whether we're early, late, or just reaching for an unreachable star is up for you to decide.

Thanks for reading and have a great day.