In the movie “Quicksilver,” Kevin Bacon plays some kind of (commodities) trader who lost an enormous amount of money betting the wrong way and retires from trading to become a bike courier.
He has a friend over at his loft, and while looking at pictures from his finance days, she asks, “What happened to all the money?”
His reply is a classic:
“It’s still there, it’s just in other people’s pockets.”
——
That’s all I see in crypto speculation. It’s a game that involves shuffling money between players, without actually creating new wealth.
(Also, the casino is betting against you and sometimes isn’t satisfied with their rake, so they “rug pull” and leave everyone holding worthless chips. But that is another issue.)
This is very different from, say, selling software that runs a business. Your software is not just transferring money from your customer to you, it’s literally creating new wealth by making your customer more productive.