Silly to look at % down from ATH when we had a massive bubble that peaked and popped. If you look at return overall, crypto beats ALL stock market investmets.
From a brief google, Uber's seed round is up 5000X so that beats my example. But Ethereum did pretty well; their equivalent of a seed round was in 2014, when one Bitcoin was worth $600, and as of today they're up 700X since then. That's down 85% from their peak of 4600X.
And I'm guessing the Uber seed round wasn't available to the average investor. If you just look at the public companies available to everyone, another quick google says the best in the last decade was Netflix at 40X gain.
> And I'm guessing the Uber seed round wasn't available to the average investor.
If you ask the SEC the majority of ICOs aren't available to the average investor either, and never should have been. Because the vast majority are pure, hot, unadulterated garbage like Dentacoin and IOTA - which emulates a ternary computer for literally no reason anyone can identify.
Nevertheless it was available and the SEC is fine with Ethereum today. In any case, as far as the Crypto Fund goes my second paragraph was irrelevant anyway.
I mean, look, the point is that you can't compare when bitcoin first opened up to an asset, it was a toy that surprisingly people pay for today even though it's being propped up by Tether and Bitfinex. It's akin to comparing the par value (1/10th of a cent) per share that the Uber founders received at formation - a 5,000,000% return. That makes the returns quite comparable. Starting something can be lucrative.
It is by no means the best performing asset. Anyone with shares from the formation of a startup has outperformed.
Equity is passive investment once you own it whether you remain employed or not. It's capital gains once you own the shares, not ordinary income. You can also include anyone you want in the cap table at formation, not just employees -- if you wanted, you could easily issue your advisory shares at that time.
Not to mention, at formation, you're more than welcome to pay market salaries to your founders, that's your perogative as a founder.
Not a startup. They don't just go from seed round to IPO on idle. The founders had to invest thousands of hours and immense stress to get it to IPO. Meanwhile a holder of 1000 BTC from 2012 probably continued to work their day job until 2017 when they incidentally became multi-millionaires.