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0 pointsspaceman_20203y ago0 comments

You are aware that this is true for every trade, right? If you sold NFLX at 600, there was also someone buying it at 600.

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twoWhlsGud3y ago

There's a big diff in the case of NFLX - the speculation gains are not what the market is for (from a social good standpoint) - they're a side effect of having a market for raising capital for doing useful things (where useful gets defined in a decentralized way by their customers). I mean congrats on winning the lottery, but let's be clear on why crypto mostly has been making us poorer overall.

spaceman_2020OP3y ago

Outside of the outright scams and meme coins, the speculative value of most cryptocurrencies stems from the same belief that if (or once) the revenue levers are turned on, they will generate a lot of usage and revenue.

Ethereum is valued at $x,xxx per token because of the belief that more and more dApps will launch on it and everyone who uses them will have to buy Ethereum.

Uniswap's UNI is valued at $x per token because of the belief that once there is regulatory clarity, UNI holders will get a % of the revenue generated by Uniswap (currently over $100M/year).

These are basically startups with tokens. Some of them will go bust. Some of them will take years to monetize. Some will be profitable within a year.

lmm3y ago

Which might have been a speculator, or it might have been Netflix doing a buyback with money from their subscription revenue - people paying to watch movies, concrete real-world value.

As far as I can see there's no real equivalent for cryptocurrency - some crypto orgs notionally have revenues, but they always come from speculators or other crypto orgs (and, sure, maybe some drug dealers or capital control evaders, but that's a tiny fraction of the funding). Money goes into the crypto system and nothing of value comes out.

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