Absolutely nobody paying even a drop of honest attention was surprised by any part of the crypto drawdown
It has significantly outperformed VC darlings like Peloton (-93%) and WeWork (-90%).
You can't tell me that WeWork stock wasn't working on the greater fool theory any more than Bitcoin's price works on finding more bagholders. It's all a grift, some worse than others.
It's absolutely not informative to compare their returns to various crypto.
That doesn’t change the fact that crypto is zero/negative sum.
Predicting tops/bottoms is a fools errand, however. If you thought Bitcoin was overpriced at $15,000 and see it rise to almost $70,000, only to see if fall, but not past the point where you initially thought it was overpriced -- well, hopefully you at least didn't bet on it being overpriced at $15k.
I remember thinking how crazy Tesla's price seemed to me in June/July 2020. It then proceeded to go up more than 4x that price over the next 1.5 years before falling, but TSLA is still trading ~30% higher than those June/July 2020 prices.
Meta crashed 73%. Tesla crashed 70%. Netflix crashed 72%.
Everyone knew it was always going to come down, but if I were to tell you in September 2021 that Meta was going to trade 70% down within a year, you wouldn't have believed me
I would have probably asked "who is Meta?" at which point you explain you are a time traveler, and Facebook was to change their name in the next few months, too. After my initial laughter, I suppose I'd believe your whole story, because you can't make this stuff up. Next thing you'll tell me, Zuckerberg has legally changed his name to "The Cooler Mark".
I have always said (w/comments to back it up) the $600 checks were going to cause huge issues sooner than later. I don't think its that prophetic or controversial (its basic econ) but at the time it seemed if you even suggested the idea that printing so much money was a bad idea you were seen as "hating poor people" or some other flavor of "against the common man."
Still. I can't say I would have believed you. Otherwise, I would have shorted the whole tech sector.
Then out of the blue, for no real reason, it went up again, hitting another new high.
Point is: markets are completely irrational and predicting what they're going to do or not going to do is a futile exercise.
Maybe not down 70%, but certainly down a lot due to iOS privacy changes, which are being taken up by other platforms and browsers as well.
A big chunk of the negative sentiment however can be attributed to those ridiculous metaverse demos that they've spunked $15b of cash on.
In real terms, Bitcoin and Ethereum didn't perform any worse than most major tech stocks, and outperformed many pandemic tech stocks (Zoom, Peloton).