Now since cryptos are currencies themselves, it makes no sense of talking about a market cap. The market cap of stellar is the number of stellar available.
The market cap of a real currency like USD is the money supply. The money supply has probably a couple dozen different definitions depending on how you want to look at it and the fungibility of different representation of money. (Eg does it really make sense to consider burned bitcoin or satoshi's supposedly "never moving" bitcoin as part of the "money supply")
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Money_supply#United_States
There is a reason forex market economists/analysts don't talk about the "market cap" of the Japanese Yen or market cap of the British pound.
There is also the whole intrinsic value of a company part. People buy stock because they believe the company is worth more than other people do. They (except for minor exceptions in the case of small investors) judge the companies future ability to generate profits and cash to decide on whether the buy or sell the stock. People buy crypto on pure speculation that other people will buy crypto in the future.
Amazon's balance sheet [0] shows assets minus liabilities of $19 billion. So the "assets" that shareholders "own" are less than 3% of the company's $690 billion market cap.
Not to mention that shareholders don't "own" those assets in any real, tangible sense.
If you look around at any form of wealth, from the balance in your checking account to stocks, bonds and even the title on real property, it's all invisible, intangible and socially constructed.
Not as different from cryptocurrency as one would like to think.
[0] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1018724/000101872417...
That's basically what you are saying.
Here's the thing though. Crypto currencies can have lots of uses. And even "simple" ones "only" made for payment like XLM and XRB have a value when they let me transact fast and cheaply.
I look forward to a future where my money is mine. Where no bank can arbitrarily decide to FREEZE MY FUNDS that I have LOANED TO THEM. The banking system is broken. Sure it gives us some nice things in return like fraud protection. But increasingly I begin to wonder whether the advantages of trad-banks are worth giving them control over my money, and increasingly the answer seems to me to be no.
I don't think he's saying that at all. Google is pretty digital but has value because it has millions of paying customers. With things like dogecoin the value proposition is more questionable.
If you can accept the later is where the real value is, eventually you're going to get to the point where you see the REAL value is in putting these pieces together into a system where a customer can exchange $$ for the value being created.
Then look at somebody like Stripe, and say, they make all the $$ just facilitating the exchange of $$ online.
Now, all of a sudden these other crypto services that enable the exchange of $$ don't seem so out there or do they?
1. Crypto-assets like Bitcoin/Ethereum/Steller/Ripple, etc, are created simply by typing some numbers into a piece of software. There's no underlying value, it's a number in a database.
2. Stocks have measurable value, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price%E2%80%93earnings_ratio
3. Anytime someone sells a Bitcoin or whatevercoin it requires a buyer. Similar to baseball cards, beanie babies, or other artifitially scarce yet easy to produce asset, the market is subject to supply and demand. In the case of cryptocoins, the supply is created and distributed to a small group of users who horde it, in the hope that new users will come in and purchase the coins for more than it cost to create them. This is a hallmark of a typical pyramid scam, which collapses once no more investors can be found, leaving the late adopters holding now worthless "coins".
4. Stocks in Amazon and businesses grant you legal rights, and if the company goes bankrupt you are entitled to compensation from their assets.
My view is that everything is a pyramid scheme from the first wampum and beads that were traded by humans on down the line to where we are now. The difference is crypto is a chance to get in at the top for once. That chance was missed ages ago by our generation with regard to the US dollar.
If, in your hypothetical example, the reason there were no buyers was completely unrelated to the performance of Amazon as a company
And the price of Amazons stocks dropped enough, eventually it would reach a point where Amazon would start buying its stocks back as it would be financially nonsensical to not do so
The difference is crypto is a chance to get in at the top
for once.
Anyone who wants to just needs to create their own crypto-asset and market it like the others to convince "speculators" it's worth purchasing.
Notice how bitcoin/cryptocoin advocates tell others to "HODL" - psychological manipulation is needed to maintain the artificial market scarcity as there's no real demand, use, or acceptance from retailers. [1]
If you're genuinely concerned about control of the money supply, you would voice concern about how cryptocoins are majority owned by only a few hundred people [2] and because of how tether [3] has been marketed and used on exchanges it's essentially like the federal reserve of cryptocurrencies except it's just 2 guys and it's alleged to be backed by nothing which could mean they're stealing large amounts of cryptocoins. Given all the theft in the cryptocoin system, one might wonder if regulations and security standards exist for a reason. What happens if thieves become the majority wealth holders of all the cryptocoins?
[1] https://stripe.com/blog/ending-bitcoin-support
https://steamcommunity.com/games/593110/announcements/detail...
[2] http://www.businessinsider.com/bitcoin-inequality-2014-1