Except 75% or so of this bubble is mined in China and more American firms keep buying into it...

This story doesn’t likely have a happy ending.

Proof of Work crypto is mined where energy is cheap.

And energy is cheap where it is subsidised or in abundance. The first is often 'China'. The second, currently often hydro.

A lot of mining is now moving to Iceland, Canada etc. Where energy is becoming cheaper than CPC funded energy.

> This story doesn’t likely have a happy ending.

And that's exactly what you would expect when extrapolating from the economic argument above!

To come back to the analogy with dot-com companies:

In a field where a winners might give you outsized 100x returns, you expect perhaps 99 out of 100 companies to be total garbage losers that go bust. So that the average return from investing in all companies in that field is something normal.

Otherwise, rational investors will keep pumping money into that field and funding more and more companies until that's true.

Same here: even if you believe that in 20 years cryptocurrencies will dominate the world economies (just like 20 years after the dot-com boom and bust, internet companies like Amazon and Google dominate economies), still most almost all cryptocurrencies will fail.

The political risks, that you are alluding to, fit this argument just like any other risk would.

Thanks to eg bitcoin futures, it's not relatively easy to go shortsell (something like) bitcoins, so I expect the market price to be roughly in line with the best forecasts possible.

(Only 'roughly', because the market for bitcoin is still pretty tiny, and not very developed, compared to eg US inflation forecasting markets like https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/T5YIE )

Why doesn't it have a happy ending?

"China" isn't one people either.

Plus all the Tether shady stuff.