There's often a "bigger-fool" element to many types of assets (not, incidentally, to modern currencies). But there's a sliding scale. Would your asset, under c

There's often a "bigger-fool" element to many types of assets (not, incidentally, to modern currencies). But there's a sliding scale. Would your asset, under conditions of perfect information (, public pricing, market equilibrium, etc. etc.) fetch some price in the long run? In the case of startups, yes... I think many of the early-stage dynamics are the same... but there's incredible competitive pressure towards "long-run real productive value"... in most cases, outside of scams, founders have strong incentives to turn fools into investors. Whether someone is just a "bigger fool" or an "investor" comes just from where the future value of their stake will come from -- is it other fools, or is it a genuine long-run demand? In the case of start-ups, if they fail to deliver that productive value, there's a sense in which it was, retrospectively, a foolish enterprise. But I think we should just call that the relevant downside-risk on honest investment. As far as I can tell, everyone involved in crypto pretty explicitly think's their future value is coming from bigger fools (ie., that it will "go to the moon"). No one involved seems to have any plan for making a coin have a future value of its present cost, in the long run... ie., when the plates stop spinning