[exdsq]

Maybe you mean that they haven’t made useful ground, where useful is specific to you.

Remember that blockchain technologies have become legal tender, have over a trillion in market cap, have become financial instruments traded by people around the globe, is taught at Universities and part of the CFA accounting exam, is in the news daily, has resulted in large investments in research, etc…

It’s impact has hardly been non-trivial. Just the impact on finance is substantial even if people seem to gloss over a new financial asset as “just finance stuff”.

[ryandamm]

When has "market cap" been a measure of a currency? This is indicative of the logical fallacy so common in these debates, conflating "store of value" with "useful mechanism for transactions."

It's a Ponzi scheme. There's no inherent underlying value, its "market cap" is strictly a function of more dumb money flowing into the system. Occam's razor, this is the most likely explanation for everything in the crypto space; the model makes sense and explains a lot more than "a new financial asset" hokum.

[exdsq]

Depends if you view them as stocks or currencies, no? If it’s stocks then market cap is normal. Anyhow, if it was a giant Ponzi scheme then what about the projects ran by JP Morgan/Visa/Deloitte/etc? I have no doubt some projects are scams, but there are also non-ponzi projects and I don’t agree with painting them all with the same brush.