The stock market is not zero sum. Liquidity is provided so an enterprise can generate value. Thus a dollar put into the stock market generates value exceeding a dollar, creating more value in the world. Therefore the stock market is positive sum.
Cryptocurrency currently does not have a way to generate value outside of illicit activities. There are very few supply chains you can leverage using cryptocurrency to generate anything new: it's either information products (like Axie Infinity or Earth2 or any scam) or illegal products. Its high-visibility, no-trust nature makes it unsuitable for practical daily use.
I would not use an immutable, permanent, public ledger for any purchase, let alone for stuff I purchase normally and legally. The concept is laughable. It might be pseudoynmous, but such a high-fidelity and lossless record will be used for future entity resolution. (And also, as Ethereum proved with the hack of the DAO, such promises of "permanency" and "immutability" is couched in the concept of network effects and operative ownership, at least as far as any utility is concerned).
And the crypto space keeps learning hard lessons. Like, for example, what "trustless" actually means. Lots of scams based on trust in the space. Those are two different meanings of the word "trust," which I and many technical people can distinguish, but non-specialists can not. They are, inevitably, the crowd that has historically lost the most in the crypto space and will continue to keep losing. Because they have a natural counterparty, the predators and scammers in the space.
Now let's talk about the hard lessons the specialists keep learning. They keep learning what "trustless" means. The collapse of TerraLuna, Celsius, Tether, and SBF proves that nobody in the space has any clue what they're doing nor the ramifications of organizing people at scale. Vitalik Buterin was likewise also revealed as a no-talent hack when he hard-forked Ethereum after getting taken to the fucking washers during The DAO hack.
On top of all the people who learn why laws are built with an understanding that ambiguity is natural and inescapable. Arbitrariness is both a feature and a bug in natural law. Anyone who has ever been taken to the washers by someone exploiting a bug in a smart contract has learned a hard lesson about subjecting assets to algorithmic vicissitudes.
And the scammers in the space are learning hard lessons about what it means for a ledger to be permanent, immutable, and public. As entity resolutions methods get better, the same data remains perfectly amenable to novel methods.
The whole thing is a farce, from the tech to the social aspects.
