$25K is not zero, but it would be hard to distinguish the effective difference if you're leveraged $250K.

So, as with any investment, if you're spending monopoly money on cryptocurrencies, scoff away. But if your retirement depends on it...

I don't have monopoly money in crypto, in fact I just cashed enough out to put a downpayment on a house just yesterday (fortuitous timing), but I understand how volatile the market is and I only invest what I can afford to lose.

Honestly if crypto did lose 95% of it's value overnight, I'd still keep on buying, and just wait until the market recovered. I don't want that to happen, I'd love for it to go up forever without ever dropping, but I understand that's not a reasonable idea, especially after sitting through the last two major Bitcoin crashes.

Maybe. If you actually own the house, sure. But many people had a mortgage, lost their jobs, and they couldn't afford the mortgage any longer. Additionally you can borrow against the value of your house. But since that house was practically worthless, they couldn't borrow to get through the job loss.

Las Vegas saw some similar action. It suffered the worst overall top to bottom crash of any major city in the US.

Cisco went from ~$550 billion to ~$50 billion.

That was a real business with billions in profit. That single drop is nearly greater than the value loss in all the junk dotcom stocks combined. There were dozens of real businesses that were massively over-inflated, from Intel to Microsoft.

Oracle went from ~$200 billion to ~$35 billion. Again, another very serious business with substantial profits.

So how about Bitcoin goes to $3,000 to $6,000 and stays there for ten years? Impossible! everyone will cry.

There's not an equivalent to mutuals in the cryptoverse yet, but there will be.

I've made quite a few small bets on various alts. I'm taking the black swan approach to them. Quite a few could drop to zero in a couple years but I'm betting at least one of them will make enough of a profit to eclipse my losses in the others. If one of them had been Raiblocks, that already would have been the case ($0.10 cents to $34 in 3 months...crazy). It missed my radar because the aggregate site I check didn't include it.

Something that you want me to use to buy things with should not be so volatile that it goes from pizza to luxury home in less than ten years years. If I had some bitcoin "lost in the cushions of my couch"from that era I would be a rich man today.

Crypto currency has become a massive misnomer. To that end I'm not sure WHAT it is any more because if it isn't stable as a currency and it doesn't have intrinsic value then what good is it?

And assets are worth whatever other people are willing to pay for it. My friend sold a digital-only World of Warcraft character to someone for over $2000 once, and for the longest time there was a sub-industry based around buildings of employees playing the game to get and sell World of Warcraft gold, so much so that it got its own term of 'goldfarming'.

Crypto has value because other people are willing to pay the asking price for it. If that ever becomes not the case, then it's no longer an asset. Could that ever happen? Possibly, and I'd say definitely for certain coins. But now that this idea exists in the world of programmable tokens that can be exchanged quickly and cheaply and decentralized public ledgers, I don't think it's ever going away, not totally.

Working equivalents already exist.

What assets does a cryptocurrency have? What value is actually there?

You can't really do this with bitcoin. It's never going to "shut down".

Waste of energy, however, is harder to argue with. Hence PoS etc.

What industry is that? Don't confuse a handful of exchanges, speculators, con-men and marks with an 'industry'.