It’s not, but “reality catching up on speculative, excessive growth” isn’t purely a cryptocurrency thing; they’re just so much a symptom of everyone wanting in on that tech stonks that only VCs could afford.
It’s funny how “the Uber of X” was an admirable description, considering that whole economic model is being questioned right now. Perhaps it just wasn’t the case that Uber was the Uber of Uber.
The second is the collapse of a bunch of crypto schemes (yield farming, leveraged funds, black box firms etc.). These two things are fundamentally different.
Focusing on the first one only since that's what crypto adherents seem to defend with the "it's just like tech stocks" claim (putting aside that crypto was supposed to be different than stocks, and deflationary), what I haven't seen them explain is how "excessive growth" would even be defined in a crypto asset. In stocks, I can point to a price-to-earnings ratio or a price-to-sales ratio to describe how a business is trading far beyond a value that even has hopes of being realized. In Bitcoin, or even worse some shitcoin used for nothing at all, what can I use to distinguish between "excessive" growth and appropriate growth?
There is a critique that can be made of the stock market that it is essentially a speculative game largely divorced from the underlying business fundamentals, and that crypto assets are just a pure form of speculative capital chasing returns. I don't think that's really true though, because stocks do seem to show significant correlation to the underlying business performance. That's why Apple is flat YoY while Airbnb is down 60%.
> In Bitcoin, [...] what can I use to distinguish between "excessive" growth and appropriate growth?
I suppose it depends on what you think Bitcoin is.
It sounds like you think it's a stock.
The SEC thinks it's a commodity.
Clearly it was intended to be a currency, although a very gold-like one.
https://journal.bitcoinreserve.com/can-we-calculate-bitcoins...
[...] researchers determine bitcoin's value based on its use in the following "addressable" markets—areas in which the asset can find the most use:
The unbanked, Tax evasion, Remittance, Online transactions, Store of value, Micropayments, Reserve currency, Offshore accounts, Medium of exchange
Reserve currency counts among bitcoin's many capturable "markets." Arguably this market is one in which bitcoin could wholly dominate—by becoming a global reserve currency.
(...the article goes into more depth.)
> There is a critique that can be made of the stock market that it is essentially a speculative game
Stocks have clear utility:
You don't have to own literal grain to be invested in our food supplies.
And you can hedge some of the risk of literally owning grain to people with money.
Whatever the underlying value of an asset is, the asset itself provides ability for hedging, which itself is valuable.
That said, if you did want to use tech stocks as a comparison, Bitcoin is the flagship asset of crypto, and meant to be the most stable (deflationary etc.) so more akin to Apple. Apple is essentially flat over the past year.