Rebuttal, I don't regret spending 8 years in the crypto industry

Author: Nic Carter, Partner at Castle Island Ventures

Translation: AididiaoJP, Foresight News

Ken Chang recently published an article titled "I Wasted Eight Years of My Life in Cryptocurrency," in which he sharply criticizes the industry's inherent capital destruction and financial nihilism.

Crypto enthusiasts often mock such "angry exit" articles and take pleasure in revisiting stories of historical figures like Mike Hearn or Jeff Garzik dramatically leaving the space—while pointedly noting how much Bitcoin rose afterward.

But Ken’s article is largely correct. He said:

Cryptocurrency claimed it would help decentralize the financial system, and I once truly believed it. But reality hit me like a truck: it’s just a super-system for speculation and gambling, essentially a mirror image of the current economy. I wasn’t building a new financial system—I built a casino. A casino that doesn’t call itself a casino, yet is the largest, always-on, multiplayer online casino our generation has ever built.

Ken points out that VCs have burned billions funding new public blockchains we clearly don’t need. This is true, although his description of incentive models is slightly off (VCs are essentially conduits of capital—they generally only do what limited partners are willing to tolerate). Ken also criticizes the proliferation of perpetual and spot DEXs, prediction markets, and meme coin launch platforms. Indeed, while you could theoretically defend most of these concepts (except meme coin launch platforms, which make no sense), their explosion is undeniably driven by market incentives and VC willingness to fund them.

Ken says he entered crypto with idealistic passion and bright-eyed optimism—a sentiment familiar to many in this space. He had strong libertarian leanings. Yet instead of realizing libertarian ideals, he ended up building a casino. Most notably, he is known for his work at Ribbon Finance, a protocol allowing users to deposit assets into vaults and earn returns through systematic options selling.

I don’t mean to be overly harsh, but it’s true. If it were me, I’d deeply reflect too. When the tension between principle and work becomes unbearable, Ken reaches his bleak conclusion: cryptocurrency is a casino, not a revolution.

What struck me deeply is how it reminded me of Mike Hearn’s article from nearly a decade ago. Hearn wrote:

Why did Bitcoin fail? Because its community failed. It was supposed to be a new kind of decentralized currency, without “systemically important institutions” or “too big to fail,” but it became something worse: a system fully controlled by a small few. Worse still, the network is on the brink of technical collapse. The mechanisms meant to prevent this have failed, so there’s little reason left to believe Bitcoin can truly outperform the existing financial system.

The details differ, but the argument is the same. Bitcoin/crypto was supposed to be one thing (decentralized, cypherpunk practice), but turned into something else (a casino, centralized). Both agree: in the end, it didn’t turn out better than the existing financial system.

Hearn and Ken’s arguments boil down to one sentence: cryptocurrency started with noble intentions, but ultimately went off course. So we’re forced to ask: what is cryptocurrency really for?

Five Goals of Cryptocurrency

In my view, there are roughly five camps, not mutually exclusive. Personally, I align most with the first and fifth, though I empathize with all. I’m not rigidly attached to any single camp, even hardcore Bitcoin maximalism.

Restoring Sound Money

This was the original dream, shared by most (though not all) early Bitcoin adopters. The idea was that, over time, Bitcoin would challenge or even replace fiat currencies, bringing us back to a new gold-standard-like order. This camp typically views everything else in crypto as noise and scams riding on Bitcoin’s coattails. Admittedly, Bitcoin has made limited progress at the level of national sovereignty, but in just 15 years, it has advanced far enough to become a significant monetary asset. Those who hold this view live in constant tension between disillusionment and hope, oscillating between near-delusional expectations and the belief that mass adoption is just around the corner.

Encoding Commercial Logic via Smart Contracts

This vision was championed by Vitalik Buterin and most of the Ethereum camp: if we can digitize money, why not express various transactions and contracts in code to make the world more efficient and fair? To Bitcoin purists, this was once heresy. Yet it has achieved real success in narrow domains, especially those easily expressed mathematically, such as derivatives.

Making Digital Property Rights Real

This is my summary of the "Web3" or "read-write-own" philosophy. The idea has merit: digital property rights should be as robust and enforceable as physical ones. Yet its implementations—NFTs, Web3 social—have either gone completely off track or, more charitably, emerged too early. Despite billions invested, few now defend this philosophy. Still, I think there’s value here. Many of today’s internet problems stem from the fact that we don’t truly “own” our online identities or spaces, nor can we effectively control who we interact with or how content is distributed. I believe we will eventually reclaim sovereignty over our digital assets, and blockchain may play a role. But the timing isn’t right yet.

Improving Capital Market Efficiency

This is the least ideological of the five goals. Few people get excited about securities settlement, COBOL, SWIFT systems, or wire transfer windows. Yet this remains a genuine driving force behind a significant part of the crypto industry. The logic is: Western finance runs on outdated tech stacks, and due to path dependency, upgrading is extremely difficult (no one dares replace core infrastructure handling trillions daily). A refresh is long overdue—and must come from outside the system, with a new architecture. The value here lies mostly in efficiency gains and potential consumer surplus, making it less glamorous.

Expanding Global Financial Inclusion

Finally, there are passionate believers who see crypto as an inclusive technology, offering low-cost financial infrastructure globally—providing some people their first-ever access to financial services. This means enabling self-custody of crypto assets (now more commonly stablecoins), access to tokenized securities or money market funds, credit cards issued through crypto wallets or exchange accounts, and equal treatment on a financial internet. This is a very real phenomenon, and its surface-level successes offer comfort to many idealists whose enthusiasm has waned.

Pragmatic Optimism

So, who is right? The idealists or the pessimists? Or is there a third way?

I could write at length about how bubbles inevitably accompany major technological shifts, and how they actually catalyze useful infrastructure development—and that crypto is especially speculative precisely because it is financial technology—but that feels somewhat self-consoling.

My real answer is: pragmatic optimism is the right stance. Whenever you feel despair over the crypto casino, you must cling to this. Speculation, frenzy, and capital flight should be understood as inevitable yet unpleasant side effects of building useful infrastructure. They carry real human costs, which I don’t trivialize. The normalization of meme coins, pointless gambling, and financial nihilism among youth is particularly disheartening and socially unproductive. But these are (even negative) side effects inherent to building capital markets on permissionless rails. I don’t think there’s another way—you simply have to accept this as part of how blockchains operate. And you can choose not to participate.

The key point is: cryptocurrency has purposes, and it’s perfectly normal to hold ideals about it. These very purposes motivate thousands to dedicate their careers to this industry.

It’s just that it might not be as exciting as you imagined.

The world likely won’t suddenly adopt Bitcoin en masse. NFTs haven’t revolutionized digital ownership. Capital markets are slowly going on-chain. Beyond the dollar, few assets have been tokenized, and no authoritarian regime has fallen because ordinary people held crypto wallets. Smart contracts are mostly used for derivatives, little else. The value created often ends up captured by large corporations or returned to consumers via efficiency and cost savings.

Therefore, the real challenge is maintaining optimism grounded in realistic possibilities, not blind fantasy. If you believed in a libertarian utopia, the gap between expectation and reality will eventually disillusion you. As for the casino effect, unchecked token emissions, rampant speculation—these should be seen as ugly blemishes on the industry’s belly: hard to remove, yet objectively present. If you believe the costs of blockchain outweigh its benefits, then disillusionment is entirely justified. But in my view, the current state is actually better than ever before. We have more evidence than ever that we’re on the right path.

Just remember the goal.