Curves and boyfriend distraction

_{The life cycle of many crypto projects (and a lot of other things too).}

Everyone on the internet has seen the "distracted boyfriend" meme a thousand times...

...an attractive, sharply-dressed and poised young woman distracts a young man's eye as he walks with his now-girlfriend as she looks at him, stunned - a woman scorned. The now-girlfriend is sure to soon be the then-girlfriend.

Everyone in cryptocurrency has seen this story play out multiple times...

...there is the crypto or project-of-the-day, going along fine, gaining followers and getting mentions. Then, a new crypto or project emerges and gets some attention, then it rises quickly. Who knows why it rises quickly? Perhaps, it rises quickly because of the fact that it rises quickly...the effect of FOMO. Then it reaches a natural peak of some sort. These are the glory days. And finally, a young new crypto, attractive, sharply-dressed and poised, attracts new attention. Then the slide downward begins for the project-of-the-day. It's now the project-of-yesterday.

I'm sure anyone reading this could name more than a few crypto projects that fit this description. If you've been on Hive a while, you could likely name some Hive projects that fit this description.

The challenge

The challenge for crypto projects is to somehow buck this normal curve - that mole hill shape that occurs in nature almost perfectly sculpted in more places than we might imagine. Things like the height of trees or people reflect the curve. IQs of humans reflect it almost perfectly. Sand or pebbles flowing along does the same thing. Watch a Galton board in action, it's mesmerizing. The predictability of the results gives us games like Pachinko.

The challenge for a crypto project is to somehow keep the left half of the curve in tact, but to avoid the right half's downward slide. Doing so, the ultimate goal would be to buck the natural trend toward the normal curve and achieve the shape of a "cumulative distribution" of the normal curve.

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Following the cumulative distribution would mean the young woman in red captured the young man's attention and heart. They had a fast romance, married, had kids and a family dog, aged well together, and stayed together the rest of their days. 🙂

For crypto, it would mean that the chain or project started, caught fire, grew and matured, and then reached a maximum (there are only so many people on the planet), and then also maintained each of those users. 🙂

Just a nerdy sidenote, the normal curve uses standard deviations on the horizontal x-axis. Regarding crypto and the distracted boyfriend analogy, I'm thinking of the passage of time on the x-axis and the number of crypto enthusiasts up the y-axis.

Think about internet usage or mobile phone usage over the years. They've increased, fast at first, then not as fast, they maxed out with the population, yet almost no one stops using them. They follow the cumulative distribution curve. Thus far, a pretty, well-dressed and poised young new internet hasn't stolen away web users.

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Use cases seem to be the key for crypto projects to avoid the bell curve shape and to achieve the cumulative distribution shape. That is to say, use cases are the key to keeping users. (That sounds awfully obvious and dumb as I type it!)

From a Hive perspective, I think this bodes well for the chain. Hive has real-world and regular-person use cases. There's a little bit of a learning curve to newcomers, but with a little effort Hive offers use cases from day one.

Summary

Crypto projects (and likely a lot of other things in life) can rise fast, peak, then subside and effectively be over. The challenge is to grow and maintain. Use cases are likely the key.

We've all heard that, "The shortest distance between two points is a straight line." Agreed. Mae West once said, "Curve: the loveliest distance between two points."

I'm not sure what the lesson is here with that quote, but, with the distracted boyfriend meme, I feel like there's a lesson for crypto in there somewhere and that Mae West is probably 100% right.

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