[acdha]

> Eventually it would reach ~0 share price and effectively a 0 market cap.

This is the misunderstanding breaking your argument: AMZN shares are fractional ownership of a company with assets and ongoing revenue. In the event of a business downturn, those will go down but they’re not going to zero in any plausible scenario - even bankruptcies usually return some fraction of value to shareholders.

This is important to understand because cryptocurrencies are the weakest form of a fiat currency: unlike those AMZN shares they have no value except for social consensus and unlike a sovereign currency they have no pressure creating demand — nobody must have them to pay taxes, there are no government contracts or salaries, etc. and there’s no inherent value to a random number so there’s nothing to keep that floor above zero.

[fragmede]

> even bankruptcies usually return some fraction of value to shareholders.

The three issues with that are 1) liquidation preferences, 2) the fact that normal people can only afford to hold an infinitesimal amount of Amazon stock, and 3) (basically) only common stock is available for purchase by normal people. This means while that's technically true, unless you're, eg Jeff Blackburn, you ain't getting shit if Amazon were to close shop and return the money to investors.

Let's say you're holding 100,000 shares of AMZN. At ~$3k per share, that's some $300mm in shares, but with 508.84M shares outstanding, that's a grand total of... 0.02% stake in the company. In an unlikely fire-sale of the company and returning value to shareholders, that could still be worth something, but it's a unreassuringly small number.

[ipaddr]

They represent the same value prop as any stock. Any company could go to 0 and the floor of the exchange is littered with delisted companies.

Amazon is big and the chances it goes to 0 are less than a company still making vcrs. The same can be applied to bitcoin.

Government and other contracts could be cancelled. The value of assets can be lower the debt. Bitcoin has no debt while a company like Amazon can have billions of dollars of debt.

[acdha]

> They represent the same value prop as any stock.

Try thinking about this a bit more: what do you have if you buy a share of stock? What does that company own, what is its ongoing cash flow, etc. Now repeat the same thing for Bitcoin and notice how the answer is “nothing” except for the possibility of getting someone else to buy your coins.

That's the difference: there's no plausible reason to think that people are suddenly going to stop shopping online or using cloud computing. The price isn't going to suddenly tank because other people will buy into a popular company which has shown it can reliably run profitable businesses.

In contrast, nobody needs Bitcoin for any reason — we all have alternatives for currency, value storage, etc. which are cheaper, faster, and easier to use and almost nobody as a requirement that they buy Bitcoin. If some web3 play actually comes up with something normal people want and they all switch to Ethereum, there's no floor on the price. Unlike Amazon, there's no revenue stream which can be used to pay dividends or buy shares back when the price falls.

Another way to think about it is to ask who'd notice if it's gone. Amazon disappearing would disrupt business all over the world in multiple industries, and that cost of switching provides a lot of inertia. Bitcoin is mostly used for speculation and the vast majority of the fraction of transactions representing real economic value have easy replacements. When the switching cost is that low, there's little pressure to stay. Even if you really believe cryptocurrencies are the future, there's no law of the universe saying it's going to be this one rather than the many drop-in replacements.

[cuteboy19]

> Bitcoin has no debt

True, but it also burns many TWHrs of electricity everyday. Also I doesn't have any revenue.

If you look at it like you would look at a normal company, then it would be a terrible purchase. A company that just burns cash for no reason and generates 0 revenue