I think you underestimate how attractive “get rich quick” schemes are, especially to new generations that didn’t experience the fad yet.
Bitcoin will be back in a few years in a new bubble. Halving in 2 years...
That's the only way it will grow.
Betting on investors risk tolerance for cryptos success is a losers game long-term. At least from a technologist perspective. From a finance perspective there's plenty of money to be made if you aren't left holding the cards.
It earns nothing so that's near zero. (Not quite zero because apparently you can use it to buy drugs or avoid export controls)
Now it's just democratized. But at least Web2 led to tech that served a lot of people, until it got commoditized. Crypto doesn't really have great applications yet. (With a few exceptions.)
I seem to remember Softbank propping up companies like WeWork... and spectacularly losing money. Even this year they lost a lot. Uber and many others were basically money-losing unit economics being propped up by ever larger infusions of money until the stocks were dumped on the eager public in an IPO. But at least the corporations serve people.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10000872396390443720204578004...
How were Adam Neumann, Travis Kalanick and Elizabeth Holmes any better than these crypto bros?
The online advertising industry is in a constant race to the bottom. Look at how much Facebook and Google dropped relative to, say, Apple and Verizon.
Throughout all this, the open source community in Web1, Web2, Web3 has been building some amazing stuff, but people like to create business models to dump
People still seem to think they're an aberration.
They're not. The entire modern economy is fundamentally scammy. Especially, but not exclusively, the financial industry.
Crypto is just the stinky tip of an iceberg of fraud and predatory exploitation which goes all the way from top to bottom.
To use your metaphor, Bitcoin and Ethereum are more in the [schemes] class, rather than two specific schemes.
Now of course nothing is eternal, but years-shorting crypto is too much of a risk for me.