Honestly though, doesn't this also apply to a lot of people's choice of stocks?

Sure, except Bitcoin wasn't created to be a stock. That's the point here. It's basically just imaginary stock in an imaginary company now.

Stocks are an investment in productive assets.

Somewhere down the chain stocks invest in actual production value, which creates goods or services that people use, and increases the sum total of wealth in the world.

Buying the stock is buying the rights to a stream of income based on that productivity.

These "investments" in cryptocurrency don't have that aspect whatsoever. There is no claim on productive enterprise involved, and for the more niche offerings that have some element of that the economics are so wildly divorced from the fundamentals of productivity to make the link meaningless.

> There is no claim on productive enterprise involved

That's not true. Many coins offer practical solutions to real world problems. Whether they are adopted at scale is the gamble. Very similar to betting on companies with stock.

Theoretically. But it's kind of like betting on a 4 person seed stage company by raising a $3bn Series F round. Except with no actual legal ownership claim on the productive assets of the company. Which means it's actually nothing like buying regular company stock at all.

Ish. They solve some problems, but they do not intend to solve the hard part - the adoption for real world uses.

Absolutely - many of which can be, and often are, overvalued.

That's incredible. What if they don't know where to start? This is the same mentality as "hackers hack, they don't ask if they are hackers".

They should have bought shit tons of DDR4 in 2016 and have it on eBay, new in box, now.