[advisedwang]

Their point is that thinking of money going "into" crypto means that the money is there to come out of it. And that's not generally true.

When I buy a BTC, my dollar goes to someone else bank account, who then does whatever with that dollar (spends it on electricity, perhaps). If I later get out of BTC, I don't necessarily get my dollar back. So if $1B has gone "into" BTC, perhaps only $1M comes out of it later. So seeing there as a stock is misleading.

That said, if you trust the maintainers of stablecoins, then the article's assumptions do hold. $1B spent on USDT and then later reversed should result in $1B coming back. So you can think of stablecoins as a stock (relative to the tethered currency at least)

[hattmall]

The money going in is the difference in price between buy and sell. If you buy for $5 and sell for $100 that is $95 of inflow. If you take your $100 and the buy another $100 worth, that was previously only worth $5. That's another $95 of inflow, but if you bought your original or it's value equivalent back for $100 it is not a new inflow. With traditional assets this is easy to determine, with crypto it's nearly impossible.