I have a lot of problems with how cryptocurrencies are dressed up to look like investments. Everyone talks about the market cap as if it were a company with som

I have a lot of problems with how cryptocurrencies are dressed up to look like investments. Everyone talks about the market cap as if it were a company with some underlying value and some public value. I feel that is very misleading. As well, with the charts and trading platforms, less educated adopters are treating it like a company that produces value. It is a digital collectible. There are a finite number of them produced (in Bitcoin's case, at least). The price is high due to speculative demand. People hoard them and lose them, and the price will continue to rise until it collapses. It is extremely deflationary and has no monetary controls in place to stabilize it. Government backed currencies have value because of taxes. Everyone must pay taxes in the designated currency and failure to do so is punished by a monopoly on force (the government can make your life miserable for not paying). There is no necessitating force, like taxes, for cryptocurrencies. The main use case and driving forces in their adoption are illicit (ransomware, dark markets, etc). There are no capital controls either. No one will elect to pay their employees in Bitcoin due to its extremely deflationary nature. No employer will elect to pay someone in a currency without capital controls. For example, if I agreed to pay someone 1 BTC per week for their work, and one week it is worth $1k USD and the next it is $3k USD, I would be getting seriously screwed. Also, since it is unstable, prices will always be pegged to the fiat currency (eg. 5 USD in BTC at the current market price), since charging a fixed amount in Bitcoin would cause people to be unwilling to pay it or the company to take a loss on the sale. I don't know if the illicit markets are enough to sustain demand for cryptocurrencies in the same way that taxes do for normal currencies. I personally view them as a modern day ponzi scheme driven by speculative demand. That is not to say that you can't make money off of them, but don't be surprised if they go the same way as Beanie Babies. Just don't ever expect a major entity to adopt a currency that unknown actors have large control over.