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

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.

Let's have less "to the moon" and "Lambo" talk and more discussions about the promise of peer-to-peer exchange, smart contracts and decentralized applications.

It's time to ask questions about what we want this movement to be when it grows up. 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?

Some serious crypto developers might submit that bothering oneself with such flimsy questions of identity is no better than obsessing with price levels, when the most important thing they need to do is write code and develop real, battle-tested functionality.

To be sure, a post-bubble period, when the speculators' distracting hype has dissipated, is a great time for developers to get work done. It's no coincidence that Segregated Witness (Segwit) and the Lightning Network were developed during the prior bitcoin price lull. The ERC-20 ethereum token standard was also forged in that period, paving the way for ICO boom of 2016-2017.

But the involvement of others in the advance of this technology must also be acknowledged – even those from the enterprise world, the corporate community that hardcore crypto folks tend to dismiss. The blockchain community's identity is complex and multi-faceted.