No, not at all like the stock market, which has real mechanisms for getting real cash paid by real consumers in real life for real products into the hands of stockholders.
Do people speculate on it more than they probably should? Sure. But at the heart of the stock market is a system of "I just sold a physical thing for $1000, and since you own the stock you get $0.00001 of that". At the heart of crypto is "my computer did some math, so... money".
At the heart of crypto is the desire for decentralized banking infrastructure and currency, which has non-zero cost to operate and thus requires some degree of compensation for operating the network or protocol.
Just like in the equities market, speculation and gambling dominates market values of these things to varying degrees (to a comical extent in growth tech recently, for example).
> At the heart of crypto is the desire for decentralized banking infrastructure and currency, which has non-zero cost to operate and thus requires some degree of compensation for operating the network or protocol.
But where's the value being delivered by that "decentralized banking infrastructure and currency"? Actual usefulness of crypto for genuinely decentralised (i.e. L1) transactions has been going down not up (fees are higher than ever, fewer and fewer stores allow direct payment with cryptocurrency...).
Regardless of how you feel about bitcoin, there are plenty of revenue generating products and services in the industry, serving both B2B and B2C clientele.
Oracle (READ: aggregated/decentralized APIs feed) services and other infrastructure that supports decentralized protocols (network graph, etc.)
Decentralized lending, borrowing, trading.
SaaS products in on-chain analytics, portfolio management, commerce aggreggation.
Gaming
Fine Art (a tiny minority of the art scene in crypto is pretty interesting, ex. distributed multiplayer run-time art, something that can't really exist outside of the medium)
Digital Collectibles as an end consumer product or in service of the construction of lifestyle brand / gaming / etc startups. (A lot of the most boring use cases land here, imo)
When I take a loan from a bank, I may use it for education, a vacation, medical emergency, a car or invest in a business which will generate revenue and employment.
What do people do with tokens they borrow in "DeFi"? Given that the tokens can't be used for paying college tuition or a hospital bills or rent or buying a machine?
On-chain financial stuff is just more speculation, and the vast majority of the gaming/art/collectible/advertising/content use cases are just stapling crypto onto something where it brings no benefit and often actually makes it worse.
There's a tiny sliver of cases where crypto brings real value by enabling something that you couldn't do without it (e.g. cryptokitties was genuinely novel and interesting). But it's just such a vanishingly small proportion of the ecosystem.
The topic at hand, per the comment I responded to, is imagined value. Imagined value was the subject of my comparison.
Regarding ownership, however, you can explicitly own things- or parts of things- on the basis of token ownership, but you’re right that this isn’t the way that bitcoin and many other technologies are structured.
The average tech share is a non-voting share in a loss making company selling bits on the internet with the promise of a bright future. Barely any difference with crypto
No. Stock market may look like a ponzi where one buys stocks in companies only in the hope of selling them to higher value to someone else at a later date, the value itself doesn't come from that. The value comes from future prospects of a company's actual business. A company's shares can't go on rising infinitely if it has no solid business. Why is Meta sinking? The fundamentals of its core business are looking vulnerable. Why do companies like Apple/Microsoft/Google/Amazon eventually rise? Because they are market leaders, have strong profits and they keep innovating.
Even if a company is loss making and doesn't pay dividend, there will be someone who would be interested in acquiring the company to actually run it and not just just to flip it to a bigger buyer at a later date. That is why Musk paid $44B for Twitter. Because after all is said and done, it is still the most influential social network amongst the people who matter. Owning it has a value for someone like Musk. That value comes from the activity that Twitter conducts and not the demand for its shares.
In crypto value comes only from the demand. In stock, demand comes from the value being generated by the company.
No, not at all like the stock market. Shares of stock grant you partial ownership of a corporation with assets and income. Tokens give you partial ownership of fuck-all.
Asset and income denominated in some currency which is also an imaginary concept that we decided to all agree on was worth something. Not much different if you ask me
This is not entirely accurate. The "crypto" industry is not a monolithic piece of technology or implementation. Some tokens provide governance, which is a proxy for legal ownership. Some tokens provide ownership directly or contain trustless, immutable access to assets.
I personally find decentralized programmable networks like ethereum- where it's sort of choose your own adventure in regard to utility, ownership, implementation, et cetera- to be more interesting than bitcoin.
