Yes, fully agree. But then ask yourself: aside from COVID, who created the economic conditions that lead corporations to decide that stashing treasury as Bitcoin is better than investing in the "productive" part of the economy.
QE, interests rates at near zero, corporate bonds near worthless, stock market at stratospheric 2000-like levels, real estate easily taxed to death ... how do you protect your treasury other than stashing it in hard assets (crypto, gold, commodities)?
To be clear, the above is good, if interest rates on government paper were above risk adjusted market returns for new capital this would gridlock the economy. Stock market being high incentivizes creating new capital.
> how do you protect your treasury other than stashing it in hard assets (crypto, gold, commodities)?
The government should not create artificial assets that "protects" wealth from being subject to the real economy because people divesting from the economy destroys the economy.
Now there is a question whether the market will choose to go into crypto and divest from the real economy anyways. The reason this is a question is that people have been known to pile into bubbles in the past, and this is the tricky part, on some level they are not totally irrational in doing so. To the individual, being early in a long running bubble is advantageous. When you do it, and do it first, you gain. Everybody doing it however, may cost you and your friends, family's and everybody's careers.
It's a prisoner's dilemma, a bad Nash equilibrium. It's Moloch.
Example: what happens if other companies followed the likes of Tesla and MicroStrategy? Sure the $1.5B Tesla invested is pittance in the context of their market capitalization, but if Bitcoin price crashes 80% then they've lost $1.2B. Even Microstrategy, with its alleged 85% of its cash reserves in Bitcoin, might well go under if the Bitcoin price drops even 50%.
A "run on Bitcoin" could become a real thing and as impacted companies are forced to cut production and expenses to offset the losses, it creates a domino effect across the economy.
Extra volatility in the crypto coin market disincentivizes hoarding. So while it might hurt specific companies that over do it, it may prevent an economy wide gridlock where all companies are hoarding coins instead of investing in real production.
In a way, volatility caused by corrections is a natural cure for the bad Nash equilibrium. It's when the correction mechanism stops happening that things can build up into dangerous situations. That's why when governments tried to stabilize gold in the 1930s, preventing it from naturally correcting into a volatile asset, it caused the great depression.
We've just been through a year of businesses being forced to close whilst their landlords continue to collect rent, and everyone seems to think the latter is just an amusing oversight.
In that sort of environment, it's far more logical for me to just buy hard assets and sit on them; it's been made very clear that we're going to just force that to be the winning side of the trade via legislation.
Now I'm not sure that crypto coins without being jacked up by central banks (like gold was during the great depression) are a powerful enough force to cause the type of havoc that gold did.
Then again, the potentially stronger network/memetic effects of cryptocoins, along with the amplification factor from markets being synchronized through instant all-encompassing global communications nowadays might make them dangerous to the economy even without central bank involvement. We saw how much people can get hypnotized by these things during the Gamestop episode. I don't think unsophisticated investors' hoarding is enough to cause big problems but it is a bit unsettling that Tesla and other companies are jumping on the cryptocoin train. If enough businesses follow suit, you get into scary territory (It would also be worrisome if companies widely moved to add billions in gold to their balance sheet but I thought the lesson had been learned in the 1930s with gold).
In theory, if central banks stay stimulative enough through all this, you can have growth in both crypto and businesses. As long as these central banks don't blink at the sight of what may look like crypto bubbles.