“If the stock community wants to demonstrate that it isn't a giant Ponzi scheme, why not come up with a non-deflationary stock, which will not massively reward 'early adopters' at the expense of everyone else, in perpetuity?”
Eve though you framed your challenge as a "no true Scotsman" argument, history is packed with IPOs that tanked after the companies went public.
https://money.howstuffworks.com/10-biggest-ipo-flops.htm
Last year Uber dropped considerably when it's IPO got out of the gate.
The main mistake of your argument is trying to compare something with tangible value with schemes driven by speculation and fear of missing out.
I don’t see why stocks have tangible value and tokens used to interact with a network don’t. A stock is a vacuous unverifiable virtual piece of paper. At least if you have a Bitcoin or Ether you can prove what you have and know how many there are.
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2017-02-17/dole-f...
Most stocks don’t even have dividends any more so what else is a stock for other than selling to the next greater fool?
Crypto represents nothing and is backed by nothing other than sunk-cost.
This is one of the big lies.
That's true if companies are evaluated on their fundamentals.
If you start to deal with stocks as if they were meme coins, with no concern of cash flows or business models or profitability, and you add a decade of quantitative easing, then you get stocks like Tesla, and a stock market that's driven by the need to park free cash no matter how risky and absurd the investment is.
A company might be destined to make twice their profits, yet if nobody believes they could, nobody will buy their stocks, leaving stock price the same. One might think, the stock price would certainly increase when the company realizes the profits, but it’s not the case either. The market could think that it was a one off event and the company wouldn’t continue growing. Therefore, nobody buys the stock.
Maybe sometimes. However, if a token is used to pay for blockchain services (such as shared-compute and -data services), the value of the token is at least in part based on the value of those services.
Some exchanges or other cryptocurrency businesses fizzle out.
Bitcoin price gets hit on world stability news.
> The main mistake of your argument is trying to compare something with tangible value with schemes driven by speculation and fear of missing out.
People have no idea what TSLA is planning on doing besides "cool car", and ape into the stock because of FOMO. Address this?
Everybody investing in the stock market is not a Reddit day trader.
I’m disheartened by how small the FTC and SEC actually are upon review.
And if you look at the price graphs it's not always going up. It's a synthetic currency with no real backing economy (and the transaction costs are insane). Pretty straightforward.
Literal tens of billions of dollars are using these systems to great success. The numbers are refuting your arguments, and will continue to.
When we are all carrying counterfactual wallets, able to hold any number of cryptocurrency, or NFT ownership tokens (of the deed or lease to your house, social club entry etc), with social recovery from your closest family/friends when you smash your iPhone, then what will your argument against technology be, I wonder?
The traditional systems that are apparently inscrutable to you move, in SWIFT’s case, $5 trillion (with a T) per day. These generally settle in a few minutes.
P.S. Transparently resorting to straw men like “if you doubt crypto then you just don’t like technology” is the sort of stuff that prevents people from taking this movement seriously.
Not open to you.
That's not the same as forking something to do a pump and dump scheme.
Except DWAC perhaps, but that's already under investigation by the SEC. Which has no alternative in crypto land.
Legitimate stocks are expected to be backed by the efficient creation of valuable products or services the company can sell at a profit. These profits are distributed to stock holders as dividends or reinvested in growing the profit potential. The value of a stock crucially stems from the rights to the future profits they give their holders. Legitimate stocks are not just about giving the money of late buyers of stocks to early buyers of stock.
[0] or, alternatively, dividend payouts, but that's a totally different story.