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Did you read the article? 1. The author starts out by relating how the standard story about the tulip crash may be a myth. 2. The author does not think that t

Did you read the article? 1. The author starts out by relating how the standard story about the tulip crash may be a myth. 2. The author does not think that the above myth is a good analogy for cryptocurrencies. I'm going to go ahead and paste the closing paragraphs here: The problem, of course, is that while blockchain applications make sense in theory, the road to them becoming a reality is still a long one. That is why I suspect the better analogy for blockchain-based applications and their associated cryptocurrencies is not tulips but rather the Internet itself, specifically the 1990s. Marc Andreessen is fond of observing, most recently on this excellent podcast with Barry Ritholtz, that all of the dot-com failures turned out to be viable businesses: they were just 15 years too early (the most recent example: Chewy.com, the spiritual heir of famed dot-com bust Pets.com, acquired earlier this year for $3.35 billion). As the aphorism goes, being early (or late) is no different than being wrong, and that’s true in a financial sense. As I noted above, I would not be surprised if the ongoing run-up in cryptocurrency prices proves to be, well, a bubble. However, bubbles of irrationality and bubbles of timing are fundamentally different: one is based on something real (the latter), and one is not. That is to say, one is a myth, and one is merely a fable — and myths can lift an entire species.

codingmyway 9y ago
Bubbles have their uses. An enormous amount of money and effort is thrown at a new technology in the hope of getting the bit that sticks. Most will lose and go broke but a lot of infrastructure gets left behind that later, more considered, businesses build on. True of the railways, the automobile, telecoms and the internet. Most crypto currencies will be worthless but systems be created to allow me to buy shares from you with no broker or stock exchange, to track the ownership of patents and property publicly, to enforce government spending to prevent cronyism and uses that nobody has yet thought of. Best investment is to learn the skills.

codingmyway 9y ago

Bubbles have their uses. An enormous amount of money and effort is thrown at a new technology in the hope of getting the bit that sticks. Most will lose and go broke but a lot of infrastructure gets left behind that later, more considered, businesses build on. True of the railways, the automobile, telecoms and the internet. Most crypto currencies will be worthless but systems be created to allow me to buy shares from you with no broker or stock exchange, to track the ownership of patents and property publicly, to enforce government spending to prevent cronyism and uses that nobody has yet thought of. Best investment is to learn the skills.