[mrb]

The market cap metric may seem silly to you, but it's the same metric used by publicly traded corporations. And there is nothing silly about it. All shareholders would never be able to cash out at the current share price, but this isn't a reason to disregard the market cap metric.

[acdha]

There’s a key difference: corporate shares have a value anchored in the company’s assets and revenue. The market cap can still fluctuate, of course, because different people will have different assessments of the future profitability but the floor is going to be based on the company’s assets, contracts and sales predictions, obligations, etc.

In contrast, cryptocurrencies have no floor because there’s no inherent value to a random number and nobody has a need to pay for a specific token. If something falls out of favor, there’s no reason to expect to find a buyer at any price.

[nightski]

Value is anchored in the equilibrium between supply and demand, that's it.

Maybe the things you mention do drive that equilibrium. But I'd bet you'd have a hard time developing a profitable trading strategy based on those metrics alone. I know I have tried with little success.

[mrb]

Corporations can still very much "fall out of flavor", driving their revenues and assets to zero. This criticism isn't only applicable to crypto.

And cryptocurrencies' intrinsic value is this: they are payment networks that work even where traditional systems fail. No denied transactions. No limits. No "account" to open. Works for the underbanked. Send money truly anytime anywhere. No other system does this. That's the value.

In the end, there is no fundamental difference between a service provided by a corporation vs a service provided by cryptocurrencies. Both services can and do have value.

[acdha]

> Corporations can still very much "fall out of flavor", driving their revenues and assets to zero. This criticism isn't only applicable to crypto.

That's technically correct but missing the point: cryptocurrencies are an extreme outlier in that they have literally nothing other than social consensus backing them. If you look at examples of failing companies you will find a few cases of Theranos-level fraud but far more cases where a company was mismanaged into the ground but shareholders received _something_ and it's not common for this to happen so quickly that nobody had time to react. The more common trajectory is something like Sears or RIM where the writing was on the wall for years while the PE guys strip-mined the corpse or someone buys it to go patent-trolling, where a savvy investor has plenty of time to exit before the end and the people at the end still receive a fractional payout.

> And cryptocurrencies' intrinsic value is this: they are payment networks that work even where traditional systems fail. No denied transactions. No limits. No "account" to open. Works for the underbanked. Send money truly anytime anywhere. No other system does this. That's the value.

This is a good example of the problem: those claims are either completely untrue or significantly overstated but you have a significant financial interest in repeating them because being honest will imperil your ability to find someone willing to pay more for your random numbers than you paid originally.