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Comment by fivea | Hacker News Reader

> Show me a stock anyone is interested in that isn’t expected to go up and reward early adopters.

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.

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> Last year Uber dropped considerably when it's IPO got out of the gate.

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?

Maybe some people behave as you indicate but this is neither the common or original intent. TSLA is only one frothy example but they still (a) make things, (b) have a historical record, (c) report on past, present and forecasted performance, (d) have widely accepted "value", (e) can be readily exchanged for something else of value, (f) have governance that is ultimately responsible for performance, even if they're not the major cause of said performance.

Everybody investing in the stock market is not a Reddit day trader.

No one was interested in it. :)

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?

A stock represents ownership in a company that makes things. The value of the stock is relative to the performance of the company, not the amount of fools available to sell to.

Crypto represents nothing and is backed by nothing other than sunk-cost.

> The value of the stock is relative to the performance of the company, not the amount of fools available to sell to.

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.

> Crypto represents nothing and is backed by nothing other than sunk-cost.

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.

"The value of the stock is relative to the performance of the company"

This is one of the big lies.

> "The value of the stock is relative to the performance of the company"

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.

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