Here is a finance course 101 for those who didn't attend Stanford.
A financial asset is a serie of future cash flows (CF)
Asset = CF1 + CF2 + CF3 + CF4 + CF5 + CF6 + .........
An apartment is an asset. You can rent that apartment. It will produce future cash flows every month.
Let's say I own a french bakery. You buy 10% of my french bakery for $50,000. Congratulations. You now own 10% of future profits. The bakery also has inherent value. You now own 10% of the equipment and the building. You can actually go out and touch the physical building.
Let's say you buy thousands of dollars of Amazon stocks. Congratulations. You now own 0.01% of Amazon future cash flows. You also own something that has real value. You own 0.01% of Amazon buildings. Actual physical buildings that you can touch.
Crypto coins aren't financial assets. They don't produce any cash flows. They have no inherent value. When you buy bitcoin, you are purchasing thin air.
People buy it and hope they will sell it to a greater fool.
This is called speculation. The last people left holding the bag will be screwed catastrophically.
The Crypto industry is essentially educated folks preying on uneducated people. They are scammers. They just hate being called scammers.
As far as I'm concerned, this is no different than gambling. A legalized scam is still a scam. Biden was right to crack down on that Crypto trash. But now we have a fraudster in the White House.