So… my point about lotteries stands?
You invest some portion for a chance to get either something or nothing and occasionally something worth an incredible amount of money?
then don’t buy it, idk
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Can we not say the same about stocks and real estate? And if so and we should stay out of those spaces too, then what spaces should we be in?
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There are a few ways to respond to this. One thing is that speculation will always be ahead of real utility when it comes to new technology. Dog coins and ape jpegs are a culprit of the success of the meme-economy, not the cause of it. It’s like analyzing the stock market as a whole based on GME and AMC.
Today I can deposit virtual usd and receive a 5-10% return on my money with almost no risk. I can receive quite a bit more than that if I accept an increasingly small amount of risk. At a time when banks are offering ~nothing to hold your money for you. Does that count as building something? Aave and Uniswap are legitimately interesting pieces of technology even if it may seem like there’s no point to them besides swapping useless coins. Does creating a multi-million user and multi-billion dollar global entertainment/gambling network for nerds count as something? I don’t know. Wouldn’t a lot of people consider building a poker site or a video game or a sports news site pretty silly and useless too?
The bigger ideas are really hard and will take a lot of time. It seems likely the future of the metaverse and augmented reality will be intertwined with crypto. A looot of capital is being put into these projects. Digital art and digital money aren’t going away anytime soon. Remains to be seen whether crypto will continue to integrate with existing web usage through social media, twitter, pfps, and internet identity. The applications of DeFi will only get larger, broader, and more inclusive. There’s already a strong argument that anyone saving money in Turkey or Argentina should be investing in bitcoin. What happens when a protocol offers a free $50 a la pokerstars to anyone in the world to begin yield farming or p2e? What happens when under-collateralized loans become a thing?
I haven’t yet talked about the novel things Chiliz is doing with sports teams, Chainlink with oracles (including non-crypto data such as the weather), or Cosmos with web3.0 infrastructure.
Finally my question would be if you believe there is “almost endless funding and tons of brilliant people” in this industry, wouldn’t you want to bet on them eventually putting out something great?
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I’m not against investing in crypto. Quite the opposite. There are however plenty of reasons why they might not eventually put out something great. They def might.
I’ll read more into your post as you took time to write it and im not familiar with all of it of course. I did have some interviews with Augur a while back that deal with oracles and found them to be pretty ridic underwhelming when you look at the time they’ve been around and money they have burnt.
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When asking where are all the useful crypto apps, it’s worth keeping in mind that this stuff takes time to build.
I’d say no because stocks and bonds return dividends and interest. They’re investments that give returns and not just speculation.
Totally agree that most if not all of the stuff looks underwhelming taken individually (and that’s not including the 95% of it that’s pure vaporware), but viewed holistically there’s clearly a lot here. And the trend is only moving in one direction.
I also think there’s a general element of something appearing stupid right up to the point where it switches and becomes inevitable. Ipads and Twitter were largely panned as being redundant at best when they launched.
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It’s because we’re so deep into the asset bubble that we’ve come to believe that stocks are the “safe space” for our money.
Stocks can be just as speculative, as evidenced by the fact that every fund prospectus warns the potential investor that they could lose their principal by investing.
The reality is that just as with crypto, there are blue chip stocks that deliver reliable returns year after year, and there are total dogs (shitstocks if you will) that bleed investor money.
But not a single one of them guarantees a return.
Do you think the equilibrium between people just trying to make money and those trying to grow platforms/develop etc is wildly off?
Just the web platforms these all operate on are impressive. The DEX’s are incredibly functional. Wallet extensions are awesome. Even the rug pull projects have slick as shit websites. I go from crypto world to something like my eBay seller account and it’s like wtf is this broken ass trash from 1997?
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My inclination is that it’s less off than in 2017. I mean it’s still there and we perhaps exemplify it better than anyone lol. Maybe the bear market helped weed some people out and let some others develop. Maybe the participatory nature of defi and nfts helps. But it does seem like people genuinely enjoy being involved in crypto in a way that they didn’t when all you could do was buy and sell shitty ico’s. Like a lot of coins and nfts have already fallen off quite a lot from aths, yet the sentiment appears as strong as ever.
There’s no guarantee in any of this. But a key difference with stocks is that owning a slice of a company is a thing I want to have and a thing that generates profit for me. It’s not just a token I hold onto in the hopes of flipping it to someone else. It’s why owning a business is better than owning the equivalent in gold bricks.
Counterpoint: Opensea
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“5-10% return with zero risk, maybe more!”
Just textbook speculative bubble nonsense here.
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Owning crypto is a thing that generates profit for some folks.
Do you want to argue that the current stock price of Uber reflects it’s profitability? You just own a slice of something that you hope somebody else wants to own more than you. It’s the same mechanism in crypto or NFTs.
Do people use ipads anymore?
Old people love them.
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And my 3 year old.
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The big short is probably responsible for more instances of dunning krugger effect than any other movie