To beat inflation you need a real yield of zero - that's what real means, inflation adjusted; but I didn't type "real" so I don't understand this nitpick. > tr

To beat inflation you need a real yield of zero - that's what real means, inflation adjusted; but I didn't type "real" so I don't understand this nitpick. > transactions don't even involve Ether at all aside from the payment of the fee. Ethereum is a virtual machine that charges for compute time. Yes, a stupendously inefficient computation on a distributed machine that's only selling feature is that it does not have a central failure point, either technical or legal. The only application that has been found to date for this computation model is settling financial transactions outside traditional regulatory regimes, so all the discussion is predicated on the profitability of this business. You proposed that trading fees could make the model profitable, I countered that it clearly does not. Perhaps in the future it could be used to cure cancer or put people in orbit, web5 and all that vapor, but to date it's a payment/settlement network. > The vast majority of stock buyers do not expect to earn from the eventual dividends, rather they speculate on the stock itself, they hold it because it will appreciate in the future. That's exactly what I claim, crypto is similar to a stock with near zero dividends long term, pure speculation, close to zero fundamental value (or at least, extremely overvalued in regards to its actual technical merits). "But other people bought Enron stock and many people got rich trading it" does not really contradict my point of view, sure, suckers and their money can be parted in many ways. > money stock velocity of dollars on PayPal, I'm sure we would see that it is orders of magnitude higher than the general supply of all dollars out there. I'm willing to bet the exact opposite is true: the real world (non-crypto related, NFTs, ICOs etc.) trade enabled by Ethereum and subchains is a very small fraction of the trillion dollar or so that would be implied by its stock valuation multiplied by typical monetary velocities. Alas, no trustworthy data is likely to exist, so each must use their gut feelings.