People sell at some point. I'd argue it's incredibly hard to diamond hand for early holders, that is why there are more stories of people selling their coin for cheap rather than diamond hands.
If everyone stopped buying BTC and only held BTC and bought another crypto currency, BTC would go to zero since no one would be putting money in. Similar to a pyramid scheme, once there is no new money it collapses.
On the other hand, if investors decided to never buy MSFT again and sold their stock the price could go down a lot, but it couldn't go to zero because that would make the dividend yield go to infinity. If MSFT went down to $20/share it would yield over 10% a year, and it is absurd to think that no one would want to get 10% a year return.
Obviously companies can and do go bankrupt, but for this comparison I'm comparing successful crypto to successful companies.
It feels foolish to be long USD at the moment.
Perhaps its better to throw in some growth stocks that ended up not being particularly amazing such as WeWork, Evernote, Zynga, etc. All had low stock float, no/negative income and so were trading on emotion.
Are you talking secondary markets?
There are a lot of similarities for sure between Tesla stock and BTC in terms of price versus traditional measures of value (based on current income and enterprise value), not to mention the volatility.
There is not as much price discovery when a handful of owners own more than 50% of stock or crypto and are easily diamond handing. The price discovery is only happening on the portion that's actively trading which can distort the market price. I bet in the early days of BTC there were a lot of tricks like the Jason Fried/DHH Basecamp unicorn example[1].
As they eventually lose interest/need to pass assets to the kids, when they start unloading, there will be price drops as there were once Bill Gates started unloading MSFT stock. Part of the challenge that Steve Ballmer faced (other than lackluster leadership) was the headwinds and downward pressure created by BillG's retirement related unloading of MSFT stock.
[1] https://signalvnoise.com/posts/1941-press-release-37signals-...