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by cinntaile 1619 days ago
How do you explain all the money floating around in an industry supposedly worth $0?
3 comments

You're conflating two things: the tokens, and the industry. The industry has value precisely because most of the tokens do not.

Getting people to buy worthless things from you is a phenomenal business.

That's why you can get all the tokens for free I guess?
Speculation does not impart value. Price and value are not the same
You could put your house up for sale at $20 million but if people aren't buying it, then that's not what it's worth. Then value and price don't match. This isn't the case for cryptocurrencies that are traded on liquid markets, price discovery is happening all the time. Maybe it's worth $100 tomorrow or $5000, it doesn't really matter. It's still what it's worth at the time.
Maybe you didn't see what I said the first time:

Price and value are not the same. Ponzi schemes require buy in but still have no underlying value.

Also lol at crypto markets being liquid. In stablecoins maybe. Liquidity literally means volume has very limited effects on the price of an underlying. $100 or $5000 tomorrow is definitionally illiquid

I read what you said, please don't assume I didn't read your reply.

Regarding liquidity, that's not really contradictory to the definition. That's only if I meaningfully impact the price by selling, so I would have to personally cause the change to $100 or $5000 for it to be considered illiquid. If Alphabet goes down or up 50% because of a bad report it doesn't make Alphabet illiquid.

You do not understand the definition of liquidity.

Price in the crypto sphere is only dictated by transactions (which is why it's illiquid) because there is no intrinsic value. There is no wealth creation occuring. Volatility is definitionally illiquid.

In the equity sphere, assets have intrinsic value, and their price may be affected by extrinsic factors as well, but if the price tanks overnight because of bad quarterlies it's because the intrinsic value declined. The business's wealth creation potential declined.

The usual way to determine if an exchange is liquid for a particular trading pair is the spread between the buy and the sell. If you can buy or sell it quickly for an agreed upon price it's liquid. That's all there basically is to liquidity. Now lets add the constraint that you want the buying or selling to happen at the intrinsic value. If crypto has no value then everything above it is basically a bonus, so by definition crypto is liquid.

Sure when volatility gets too high on the real stockmarkets, they temporarily pause the share or the exchange and make it, by definition, illiquid. This is however a completely artificial limitation and there is nothing inherently contradictory about having high volatility and high liquidity.

I presume you belong to the school of thought that says if you can't do a cash flow analysis then it doesn't have value. But I don't get that, there are tons of things that have value without being able to do a cash flow analysis on it.

> Also lol at crypto markets being liquid

What have you had issues buying or selling on Uni or Sushi?

I think this is the definition of a bubble.