What We Learned Reporting 10 Years of Crypto History

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We journalists are a privileged race. As the saying goes, we write the first pages of history.

Nowhere has that seemed truer in my career than at CoinDesk. Even after 10 busy years of covering its whereabouts, ups and downs, the cryptocurrency and blockchain economy still looks new, fresh and different. There is so much more to the story to come.

Yet as you read the upcoming articles about iconic past crypto events, all presented in a four-week celebration of CoinDesks’ anniversary, a pattern emerges that may seem contrary to this historic and ambitious ideal. It is that often the great crypto story of the moment is that of a failure.

This coin is part of our “CoinDesk Turns 10” series which looks back at landmark stories in crypto history.

From Mt. Gox to the DAO hack to FTX, the lesson other than that crypto has too many three-letter names with an X can seem like the excessive dreams and greed of this industry repeatedly fall victim to the gravity and the limits of human capacities.

But the articles should not be read with gloom. In fact, this pattern of failure affirms a constructive characteristic of communities that engage around both crypto and journalism.

The philosophy of cryptography is inspired by the principles of open source development, which views failure as vital for evolutionary growth. This means that, with real money still in play, difficult lessons are quickly encountered and addressed, generating rapid iterative improvements.

Indeed, if you step back and apply any 10-year metric from market cap (up 160,000% to $1.77 trillion) to portfolios (up 56,000% to $84 million) to countries adopting crypto regulation or innovations (from none to almost all), this industry has grown faster than almost any in history, even if it has failed to transform the economy like its most ardent defenders had predicted it.

The ethos of journalism, at least as celebrated by journalists, embraces a similar idea. The cynical old newsroom maxim that if it bleeds, it leads needs no comment on journalists who smugly revel in the pain of others. It may also be that uncovering failures is integral to the higher calling of the professions: to bring transparency and accountability to any human endeavor in which there is a public interest.

This mission is aligned with that of the crypto community. The more engaged journalists uncover otherwise hidden failures, the faster the industry can learn from its mistakes, adapt and grow stronger.

For crypto journalists, this call for transparency and accountability, which admittedly can be overlooked by media big and small, puts a new spin on the old romantic idea that the press is the fourth estate.

According to this traditional construct, journalists are expected to hold governments and other agents of power to account so that their pursuit of self-interest does not deplete public goods in which society has a common interest, such as security, economic well-being and environmental sustainability.

In the world of crypto, we have a new notion of public good: the idea that blockchains should be free from scrutiny by centralizing vested interests, whether mining pools, venture capitalists , corporate exchanges or government regulators. Ambiguously but importantly, crypto-journalists are called upon to protect the ideal of decentralization.

All media is flawed, many terribly. But the best will put this commitment to protecting public assets through transparency and accountability at the heart of their concerns. And on that score, I’m immensely proud to lead a team that has maintained that standard in the face of relentless, baseless accusations and conspiracy theories from a hostile and often toxic social media crowd.

When, on April 14, our reporters Ian Allison and Tracy Wang received the prestigious George Polk Award for the stories that led to the downfall of the FTX exchange, it wasn’t just a big day for them or for CoinDesk. This mattered for crypto in general. Alongside reporters and editors from The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Associated Press and other US media titans, our two CoinDesk rock stars showed why it’s so important that this community exposes its bad actors and strives to maintain the decentralization of public blockchains.

But only a few journalists are rewarded with an award for supporting these noble goals. What motivates others? The answer is that by doing so, they get the thrill of discovering a great story.

And, boy, what stories is crypto throwing at us.

Some CoinDesk reporters buy into an idea I often pitch to journalism school graduates to entice them to join us rather than, say, mainstream media: This crypto is the biggest story in finance since the family Florences Medici created our current banking-centric model. silver in the Renaissance. Others see this as hyperbolic and reflecting a difference of opinion that makes CoinDesk stronger and are much more skeptical of this technology’s ability to change the world in any meaningful way.

Yet, regardless of their views, our reporters pursue stories day after day, ignoring industry critics who assume they are all crypto accomplices. That’s because these stories are inherently compelling.

Whether crypto succeeds or not, the fact that it tackles the audacious goals of transforming a centuries-old monetary system, reimagining organizational structures and community governance, and overthrowing the tyranny of the Web2, makes it a subject without cease intriguing.

What emerges is not the story of mechanical technology or the precision of mathematics and cryptography, but of humanity itself, of its dreams, its dramas, its successes and, yes, of his failures. CoinDesks 10 years of coverage reveals the Shakespearian breadth of crypto history.

Beyond the aforementioned 2014 Mt. Gox collapse, 2016 DAO hack, and 2022 FTX collapse, the CoinDesk Turns 10 series offers many more chapters in this ongoing human drama.

There’s the 2015 launch of Vitalik Buterins Ethereum for its devotees, a moment tied with Tim Berners-Lees World Wide Web; to its detractors, a drain on money for those who attached themselves to the noble idea of ​​Buterin.

There are the block wars of 2017: either a story of a destructive infighting of marginal communities, or a crucial victory for commoners, i.e. users who protected a public good from abuse. business interests.

There’s the initial coin offering (ICO) boom of 2018, which is popularly seen as an example of speculative excess and loss, but can also be seen as a story of hope. for a new inclusive capital market that was simply ahead of its time.

There’s the emergence of Facebook’s Libra in 2019, which, as flawed as many saw it, prompted policymakers to finally realize that crypto inventions could challenge their handling of major global monetary institutions.

There is the rise of crypto memes in 2020. Critics see it as a symbol of this industry’s frivolity, failing to recognize it as a remarkable expression of collective human creativity and how new communication systems are shaping ideas and culture.

And there’s El Salvador’s adoption of bitcoin as legal tender in 2021, a reminder, no matter what you think of that move, that this technology challenges deep state-based ideas of money and power. -nations.

Money, power, and the human struggle for creativity and independence: this is what emerges from the first pages of crypto history, as written by CoinDesk over the past 10 years.

What does the next 10 years hold for this technology?

Stick around and find out.

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