[lacker]

One thing that jumped out at me was that the article compares modern cryptocurrency to the dot com situation in 1997-1999, and is using it to criticize cryptocurrency.

27 billion dollars were raised in 1997-1999. Perhaps most of that was wasted. But just one company started in that time period, Google, is now worth 700 billion dollars. From an overall point of view, the dot com investment era was good investment. People just weren't sure which companies were going to be the winners.

[pdog]

Public investors lost much more than $27B. (Private investors made money.)

There were thousands of IPOs during the 1996-1999 period. Hundreds of billion of dollars were raised.

The impact of the dot-com bubble in terms of actual losses was hundreds of billions or even trillions of dollars.

[Retric]

Net losses are different from nominal losses. If someone buys at 10, the stock hits 15$ then drops to 5$, they lost 5$ a share not 10$ a share. We are easily talking about 100's of billions in losses, but 1.7 trillion is an over estimate.

[Retric]

Vastly more than 27 billion was pushed into the dot com bubble. You need to look at both private equity and public stock purchases over a significantly longer time frame of around 1991-1999. Further, you would expect gains over 20 years from such investments.

S&P 500 went from 325.49 in 1991 to 2,714.24 today (8.34x), even inflation 1.85x over that time frame.

[garmaine]

Also, Amazon.com. That's over a trillion dollars of value between them.

The Dotcom craziness gave us hundreds of companies of which only a much smaller amount survived and just a few thrived. But those few more than made up for the total aggregate investment. Likewise with cryptocurrencies. I would not be surprised, in fact I fully expect that most of the crypto coins and tokens out there will fail, investment in them being for nought. But 10-20 years from now, I would be very surprised if the total cryptocurrency industry, consisting of the winners and their descendants, is not orders of magnitude larger than it is today. Just like with the Dotcom era.