> Sadly this won't be the wake up call that we need to bring back some sort of meritocracy to American society.
People "investing" into a cryptocoin because "value goes up" weren't being part of a meritocracy what so ever.
There was never any true value to FTT. Hell, there's barely any value to BTC or ETH as it is and its been 14 years of looking for a valid use case. The little value it has is in black market, and perpetuating fraudsters like SBF.
Sitting around with $100,000, doing nothing, and hoping to get $200,000 or more later isn't really a meritocracy at all.
> Crypto isn't the only one, lots of easy-money beneficiaries will come unglued.
I hope so. The past 10 years have been absurd IMO. I am of the opinion that returning the Fed Rate back to "more than zero" has begun to unravel a lot of these "money goes up" schemes.
Now that money actually costs money to borrow (up from 0% to 3.75%), you can't just keep borrowing for infinite amounts of time and hoping for the best. You actually have to be doing something substantial with the money: building factories or buying servers or using R&D funds to hire programmers to make new things.
"Line goes up therefore I buy" is one of the _LEAST_ "meritocracy" things I've ever seen in my life. Be it crappy stock from some companies, or cryptocoin.
----------
I want cryptocoins to return to the days about solving financial problems in new innovative ways. Can we go back to talking about how to use 3-out-of-5 bitcoin wallets to implement new protocols of exchange and/or escrow? When did we become so focused on "number goes up" and "inflation hedge" and "have fun staying poor" ??
When the damn coin can do something that physical money can't do, and when people build businesses on top of that trick, that's when we move forward as a society. Not just this weird hype-fest, buying out of stadiums (Miami Stadium / others), or buying out Superbowl ads.
I’ve never been a proponent of crypto, but my mostly outsider take is that speculators have pretty much buried any hidden potential if it exists due to greed. My sense is the public is sick of crypto and does not trust it.
Crypto holders are moving their crypto off of exchanges, not selling. The majority of sellers are speculators. The fast buck they were expecting hasn't materialized. They will be back when the space matures further, and more uniformed but well connected tradFi hustlers and VCs show up, hoping to replicate their success bullshitting the public. Meanwhile, those who understand the benefits of cryptocurrencies will carry on.
> I want cryptocoins to return to the days about solving financial problems in new innovative ways.
What problems other than "how to sell drugs to suburban teenager online", "how to blackmail companies", and "how to run giant global ponzi schemes" has crypto actually solved in its 13 years of existence?
13 years after the invention of the WWW, there were almost a billion users, and it was increasingly transforming the world. If any of these crypto/blockchain ideas were actually useful, they would have been widely adopted by now for more than just criminal activity. The reality is that it's an interesting idea, but it's utterly useless for any worthwhile use cases.
ARPANET was started in the 60's. I'd call the WWW more of a killer app than a disruptive technology.
Crypto does have to compete with alternatives that are protected and funded by the govt itself. And the main problem is the slow transaction processing as I understand it. Still not technologically competitive for big systems.
Public companies sell products that people actually pay money to use.
You can literally look at the Top line audited Revenue.
Can companies be overvalued? absolutely, just like how it can be massively undervalued (e.g META)
crypto, gold, art are asset classes that don't produce anything. So, you have to find other suckers to pay higher. But all three is based on scarcity. So, it is a supply/demand philosophy (vs cash generating assets like Bonds, Stocks, Real Estate). At least BTC/ETH/Art/Gold has natural supply limits, so the only unknown is demand. How do you induce demand? By telling stories about the asset class.
Art lends itself to natural storytellling. What about Gold and Bitcoin? The charlatans and hucksters and persuaders quickly figured out that "hating government" is universal and scales very easily. So peddling Gold/Silver became easy in the name of government and Gold performed the role of this anti-government asset class for quite a long period.
The initial internet adapters, Gen-Xers also leveraged internet (zerohedge, infowars, dredge report) to amplify anti-government/elite hate and peddle gold. This worked pretty much till 2012.
But, 2012 onwards Millennials started to take control of the internet narrative and buying Gold wasn't easy on the internet. So, they latched on to this new anti-government asset class, BTC.
The era of influencers and social media accelerated Crypto story-telling culminating in peak viral story telling in 2020/21 due to the pandemic (combined with unprecedented free money both for the rich and poor).
Cryptocurrencies are here to stay, thanks to it scalable narrative about anti-government with 8 Billion Total Addressable Market.
However, BTC maximalists should be wary about BTC as the one-true asset class. As wealth concentrates among the 0.1% of BTC holders, and poor environmental impact story around BTC, newer generation may revolt and rally around another poor-man cryptocurrency (like Dogecoin or something else).
In case of normal companies there's concrete real-world value being created.
The system goes wrong when they lie about that value or business model (fundamentals) to some degree (sometimes crossing the border of legality), wanting inflated valuations, and because unscrupulous investors want just that they pile on and support the bluff.
But in this case we're talking about cases where there's never even intended to be any such value.
People "investing" into a cryptocoin because "value goes up" weren't being part of a meritocracy what so ever.
There was never any true value to FTT. Hell, there's barely any value to BTC or ETH as it is and its been 14 years of looking for a valid use case. The little value it has is in black market, and perpetuating fraudsters like SBF.
Sitting around with $100,000, doing nothing, and hoping to get $200,000 or more later isn't really a meritocracy at all.