“The only thing that really worried me was the ether. There is nothing in the world more helpless and irresponsible and depraved than a man in the depths of an ether binge.” — Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

Everybody wants to believe they’re bettering the world, and what’s more, that they’re on the brink of a revolutionary transformation. And when you’re immersed in a whole cohort of such people, a whole movement, as I was this week at the Ethereal Summit, a conference for startups building decentralized apps atop the Ethereum blockchain … well, it’s hard not to get swept up in that belief.

This is as true of the “old world” of VC funding as it is of the “new world” of ICOs. People who are angry and cynical about venture capitalists and the Silicon Valley ecosystem — and I know many — often don’t appreciate the extent to which VCs genuinely believe, in good faith, that what they do makes the world an enormously better place, by nurturing green shoots of innovation into a mighty forest of progress, and are genuinely baffled by the counter-narrative that they reinforce pre-existing social stratification while mostly just helping the rich get richer.

The anti-crypto1 counter-narratives are more varied. One is that all of this magical Internet money is a giant scam or Ponzi scheme. Another is that it’s only good for criminals and terrorists. A third is that the crypto1 space is just a casino for speculators with no real underlying value. To those of us who understand the technology, and its potential, these kinds of criticisms are fairly easily dismissed.

But even if, like me, you believe blockchains and cryptocurrencies are a fascinating technology with enormous potential, and you see in them a potential counterweight / cure for most other technologies’ ongoing concentration of power in a handful of massive companies; even though, bit by bit, one by one, former skeptics are grudgingly beginning to admit that they may be good for some things after all you can’t help but notice that, to date, crypto hype and promises outweigh actual tangible real-world adoption and accomplishments by a very, very large margin. Say what you like about Valley VCs, but you can’t argue that they don’t have a long, proud history of momentous, world-changing success.