And perhaps, more do the point -- why is BTC maintaining a pretty high price?
Your point on liquidity only stands if you presume what I think a lot of people incorrectly presume: which is, crypto as an alternative to day-to-day currency (edit: or perhaps other generally designed-to-be-liquid thing). Which, I agree with most, it will almost certainly NEVER be.
But that doesn't exclude the possibility of crypto as long-term investment/hedge against inflation.
I wouldn't necessarily argue that "crypto in the future will definitely be a big and useful thing," but I think it's wildly premature to call it dead.
$3B is peanuts compared to real equity and bond markets.
There's nowhere in the world where $3B daily volume can be called "negligible".
> Every bit of evidence is that the crypto boom has crashed to Earth ...
> Yet somehow BTC is still trading at close to historic highs.
> ... if it were remotely a functioning market or were at all "real", it would be trading at a tiny fraction of that amount. The fact that it still holds is the best demonstration of how illusory the whole sham is.
Which, as others have interpreted, is to say that the valuation (second sentence) is at odds with your perceived reality (first sentence). Therefore (third sentence) it's a "demonstration of how illusory the whole sham is".
Those are your words. You can't just alter reality to make them out to mean something else.
You seem to be under delusions that a given niche market is demonstrative of much at all. Crypto was the future. Now it's, for all intents and purposes, dead outside of crime, but as long as there are HODL sorts it can keep up the pretend value.
Basically "that's, just like, your opinion, man."
>it no better or worse than ANY OTHER SPECULATIVE THING
Bunching everything together as "speculative" doesn't somehow make them equal. Buying land is not the same as buying an NFT. Buying shares in a bank is not the same as buying Bitcoin.
Bitcoin's entire history has been crime and fraud. It temporarily duped the mainstream, but having conned main street it has returned to its crime roots.
No, that isn't what I said. I said that clearly crypto in any rational sense has failed. Not just failed, overwhelmingly, catastrophically failed. It has zero relevance to the broader market. It has retreated from even where it was five years ago, that being a massively failed experiment.
BTC has held value because most of the people who hold it didn't "put a ton of money into it". BTC is the very definition of HODL behaviour, with negligible daily liquidity. It is a house of cards.