You can buy a piece of a startup, and that has risk, but you take on that risk.

When you buy tokens, you're buying nothing.

So - ownership of something that may have value, vs. ownership of nothing.

I don't get it. A company _is_ a fiction, too. And that fictional nature is very close to the surface in a startup. Especially when you add in vesting schedules, dilution, getting squeezed out, etc.

(For more established companies, their equity's value works more like bitcoin: they might still go bankrupt and be worthless in eg thirty years, but they are unlikely to totally crash in the next few months.)