Oh my goodness surely this is going to be the absolute end for cryptocurrencies now isn't it? Is bitcoin now dead?
In the long run it seems unlikely there will be more than a couple surviving cryptocurrencies (see: Metcalfe's Law), and there will be a lot of chaos between now and then.
The OG crypto people were being bribed by all the money coming in and the ones that remained "pure" were being shunned as "toxic btc maxis".
This is like a massive wildfire that gets rid of all the "overgrowth". If it wasn't for this, there was a non zero chance that bitcoin would slowly die out.
Worse we would've ended up in a dystopian future of CBDCs and social credit etc.
I think we might still be heading there. The Fed announced recently (iirc) that a CBDC is officially on the way.
What do you mean by returns?
Nov 2020, when Paypal launched the ability to buy and hold crypto, I bought $100 of btc and $100 of eth as an experiment to see what happens over time with a buy and hold approach. I haven't touched either of them since.
While the btc hasn't done well (currently $103), the eth is worth $270. Total % gain is 86.80%. At the peak over the summer, my $200 had turned into like $1400.
Maybe index funds have done better than that? I don't know... what confuses me is with ROI... crypto by itself doesn't offer ROI other than buy/hold, where index funds often have dividends.