This isn't necessarily true. A lot of people have held crypto since you could purchase it for single digit American dollars because they believe in the fundamental tenants of crypto - permissionless world financial exchange where the levers and dials of the economic systems are not controlled by world governments.

If they believed in crypto as a unit of financial exchange, wouldn't they be actually using it for transactions instead of going full-HODL?

Cuyrrently (and at a few points in the past) it's a little hard because the value of crypto is fluctuating so wildly but a lot of early adopters have continuously been using and advocating adoption of crypto for a decade now.

The moment Target start accepting Bitcoin/Lightning payments, yes, I'll be buying all my groceries via that thank you.

It is probably true that 99.9% of people with crypto use it as a speculative investment. The remaining 0.1% true crypto idealist may exist, but I have never met one. So it makes the previous statement very much mostly true.

This type of disingenuous argument is why some of us rejoice at the crypto meltdown.

Most people in crypto I know like crypto and the cool tech it is developing, and also want to make money. What is wrong with that?

There's nothing wrong with wanting to make money. The problem is that many (most? the vast majority?) of the ways to make money with crypto are basically pyramid scheme-type scams.

Pleased to meet you jpambrun!

I am one of those 0.1% idealists.

Can you name me a single good or service priced in BTC? If it's not a unit of account it can't be a store of value.

My mate bought some beers for 87k sat the other day. A family member spent 40k sats on groceries a few months ago.

I’m actually tracking it for art

As am I!

Same with most company shares

You are wrong. No value can be added to crypto except through fiat deposit. Publicly traded companies create value by their activity. For example, if I own a share of AT&T, the value of that share goes up if AT&T runs a successful marketing campaign to get new users to sign up.

Crypto has no utility and no underlying value.

Not quite! Shares of AT&T go up because people spend fiat on buying them. The activity makes it a more attractive buy, but unless the company buys back it’s own shares they don’t go up when they make money. It’s not magic, it’s a market like anything else.

Note: AT&T is a dividend share, so it has yield. Cryptocurrencies generally don’t, they are more like tech stocks. Amazon shares don’t go up when Amazon makes money (unless they spend earnings on stock), or the market buys more Amazon stock.

That's not the full story. A company's share price drops when it pays a dividend - because it now has less money. So when a company makes money its share price does go up.

SharePrice = CompanyValue / NumberOfShares

Now it's true that trading activity can affect the share price too, for example a short squeeze. But this is due to market taking advantage of a desperate buyer rather than anything to do with the company's performance as such.

I think it is the full story. Company performance is the driver, but it doesn’t set the price. It not right to say it’s irrelevant, it is, but the most important thing is what the market is willing to pay.

The dividend price drops occurs only because the market believe this and reduces the price of their orders. It’s driven by the market responding to the loss of cash, the fact the cash was spent cannot impact share price unless there is buying and selling. The company doesn’t set the share price except for IPO.

It is compounded by Dividend Reinvestment Programs, where the dividends end up buying more stock.

Additionally, I think your equation is wrong. Company Value = assets - liabilities.

Market cap = n shares * price.

Market cap != company value.

Big tech stock is very similar to cryptocurrency. It’s all about the greater fool who will buy it from you.

> It not right to say it’s irrelevant, it is, but the most important thing is what the market is willing to pay

That's what he's saying, just he's a step ahead of you. Why is the market willing to pay that much? Because that is what they see the company being worth in the future. Repeated studies consistently the correlation between stock price and future returns to investors when adjusted for other factors that might shift value away from the investor (eg, bad governance, risk, etc). There is no predictor that is better (this is important part - its comparisons against other indicators when trying to predict the future - bc predicting the future is kind of difficult).

> Additionally, I think your equation is wrong.

market cap is forward looking. balance sheet value is backwards looking. market cap is also a guess on how much is returned to investors and not taken by other factors - legal, illegal, intended, or unintended.

Viewing the market as irrational is essentially an anti-science stance - its religious. There is no way to prove that belief wrong because people just keep saying its being irrational when it disagrees with their valuation.

And I would feel the same if a massive amount of people were pushing for it, were deceptive and exploitative about it.

There's a subreddit for that too!

https://old.reddit.com/r/gme_meltdown/

Yes! GME stock was exactly the same and just as scummy. Thanks for pointing that out.

Shares have dividends and represent a share of ownership of the underlying book value. The book value of a bitcoin is $0. Shares also come with a vote.