Most people involved in tech aren't there for the tech, they only care about money they are making from it.

(And there's no judgement in that, if you make a living selling fridge freezers it doesn't mean you have to care much about fridge freezers)

I mean. Yes and no. Someone doing some CRUD apps at some car insurance firm just to put dinner on the table is completely fine.

But then you have Theranos and WeWork and all of that late '90s dot-com crap. Most of those companies had nothing to do with tech, but still raked in lots of VC money hoping to sucker people into purchasing their worthless stock after their inflated IPOs.

Of course, it has to be mentioned that the line between fraud and value gets incredibly fuzzy in tech. So much tech is "solutionized" into products that solve problems that are nonsense to begin with. Everyone believes they need cloud-this, or managed K8S, or auto-scaling whatever. The whole industry looks like a fraud at times. Especially enterprise marketing and sales. IBM, Oracle, and others have made a racket on this. And yes they have actual products with actual features, what they are selling are dreams and fairy tales. Look closely at crypto and you'll see the same cottage industry around it today. I mean, what is NFT other than credit default swaps (CDS) for the art market? It's abstracted ownership ("ownership" with a huge asterisk next to it). You even have initial coin offerings (ICO). Every thing from the dot-com and 2008 financial engineering crisis have all been replicated in crypto.

Dot-com bubble was real companies with inflated valuations from speculators and experimental business models that weren't all solvent.

Theranos was trying to make and sell a real product but the product didn't work so they lied and cheated to cover that up because they had nothing else to offer.

Every business is dreams and fairytales because extra sizzle gets more customers

It's different from cryptocurrencies which are pure scam plays from the start.

That assumes there is no harm in what they are doing. A lot of these cryptos are more like pyramid schemes. Selling freezers is one thing, but if you know the freezer has some major defects and you continue selling them telling everyone how great they are while misleading them about issues then it is more like a scam. Don't get me wrong, some cryptos have the potential to make a lot of people money but often the people making the money are the initial investors not the public.

> often the people making the money are the initial investors not the public

What is wrong with this? Of course people who believed in cryptocurrencies since the beginning have seen greater returns compared to people who started investing now.

Every investment disproportionally rewards early adopters. Stocks, even simple savings accounts.

> Most people involved in crypto aren't there for the tech, they only care about money they are making from it.

Most people involved in anything aren't there for the thing, they only care about money they are making from it.

There. Fixed it for you.

You appear to have casually dismissed research scientists [*wave*], healthcare professionals, teachers, artists and many others who entered their field not for the money, but to do a 'thing' that benefits society.

Not everybody on this forum worships at the SV altar of capitalism :-)

At least within my bubble, the people I know who spend the most time trading cryptocurrencies hold no illusions that cryptocurrency and utility tokens are actually useful. They approach it like a game: Try to spot the next big hype cycle before everyone else, then try to exit the trade before the hype dies out and the price retreats.

It's like trading stocks, but without any fundamentals or underlying value to interfere with the "to the moon" narrative.

There are definitely fundamentals, there's no point pretending that there are not. But at this point it's now buried under mountains of hype, and has balooned to many times its reasonable price (again, reasonable in terms of fundamentals/utility, not speculation).