With experience though, you can tell that people who make bold claims like this were always idiots gambling away their credibility, hoping the 50/50 lands in their favour.
Casinos. Seriously [1].
[1] https://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1257/jep.13.3.173
Look at where hold 'em is now. It still exists, of course, but you don't see poker tournaments broadcast live on ESPN anymore. It's not even a very popular livestreaming category. It definitely went through a boom, then huge bust, and then a slide into... not really irrelevancy, just kind of a continued existence.
IMO, crypto is headed for the same fate. It will still be fun for a subset of people to gamble on altcoins, to pump and dump and run schemes of dubious legality. And just like I wouldn't count out a poker resurgence sometime in the next decade, I wouldn't count out another crypto spike in the future. People never stop loving easy money.
Which relatively quickly died off.
People may be underestimating how popular hold em was in the mid-2000s. As another comment in this thread said, it was even more popular than crypto is now, and that's without the extensive use of social media that we have today.
[0] https://www.businessinsider.com/fedex-saved-from-bankruptcy-...
That could be bonds, gold, stocks, real estate, or why not crypto? Crypto is easy to transfer.
Assets with a cash flow have something you can calculate by discounting future income. But at what rate? The market rate? Some people have a higher time preference compared to the market rate, while others have a lower one. In any case, that preference is not negative as in the EU. Nobody wants to receive money later instead of now.
"Other tangible assets" are also a risky bet. Oil hit a negative price in 2020. If supply adjusts to demand, prices should go down as technology makes it cheaper and cheaper to produce things.
Even food is subjective. You can eat for optimal health, but few people are doing that, and instead eat much too much meat. Meat requires much more land per gram of protein.
What happens if people stop SUBJECTIVELY choosing branded sugar water? Coca Cola goes down, which is what "value" investor Warren Buffett owns as 6.71% of Berkshire.
https://whalewisdom.com/filer/berkshire-hathaway-inc#tabhold...
But what is the theoretically correct price of Bitcoin? In some sense it's just like every other asset, the right price is what someone else will pay for it. But what you actually care about is what someone will pay for it 1/5/10 years from now (especially if you plan to use it as a store of value). And how do you even begin to model that?
There wasn't exactly a huge amount of interest in the startup/Wall Street space for building speculative financial instruments around, say, ISIS-issued 5-year bonds.