Let's talk about what type of financial products crypto tokens are most comparable to in traditional markets. (1/)

As most people have notied crypto"currencies" aren't currencies for very obvious reasons. They economics are deflationary, the transaction throughput doesn't scale, are too volatile to conduct commerce in and there's no mechanism for the volatility to ever subside. (2/)

The very foundation of any modern industrial economy is on the ability to write loans, mortgages and issue debt instruments. All of which are impossible to do with crypto tokens because the volatility means you can't predict it's behavior in the next hour, much less decades. (3/)

So crypto as a currency is completely dead on arrival, the economics of it being a currency are broken BY DESIGN of it not having a central party to stabilize the price relative to demand. The libertarian ideology of crypto carried with it the seed of its own destruction. (4/)

So if it's not a currency, it's a speculative asset. The purpose of a crypto coin is then to appreciate in price, to cash out in dollars, which is the exact opposite of a currency. We can look at comparable investments in traditional markets and try to draw comparisons. (5/)

However as a speculative asset, it's an incredibly pathological instrument because unlike commodities it has no use value, and unlike normal securities it has no income. (6/) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Use_value 

If we compare it to bonds, a bitcoin would be like a zero-coupon perpetual bond. These are worthless because their present and future value is strictly zero. (7/) https://martincwwalker.medium.com/impossible-finance-the-perpetual-zero-coupon-bond-eaf4460d80ef

If we compare it to stocks, it would be a company that issues stock but does nothing. Basically a shell company with no employees, product or business. The value of its future cashflows is zero and it has no capacity to pay dividends, therefore this "stock" is worthless. (8/)

If we compare it to a derivative, it would be a tradeable contract that has no terms and no underlying asset or benchmark. Basically a way of shuffling paper between people that represents no income, risk transfer, or rights and obligations. This is obviously worthless. (9/)

If we compare it to art, then things get very fuzzy because art is more in the domain of the humanities than finance. A comparable would be like a version of the Banksy painting shredded into 21 million pieces and sold on a secondary market. (10/)

If we compare it to religious artefacts, then it's most like indulgences the Catholic church used to sell in the Dark Ages. Where you could buy a certificate to absolve your sins as a way of paying homage to the church. Instead of the church, it's now the Cult of Satoshi. (10/)

If we compare it to performance art then it's most like Dadaist performance pieces by Marcel Duchamp which sold "fraudulent" bonds repreenting ownership in gambling at Monte Carlo, to make an point about the commercialization of the art market. (11/) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monte_Carlo_Bonds

If we compare it to gambling products, it's like a closed loop economy of casino chips where people stake their chips in games of chance against other gamblers in zero-sum games of chance with the casino taking a rake on all the action. (12/)

If we compare to financial scams, it's most like a self-organizing Ponzi scheme in which the outflows are not controlled by a central operator, but by a high-control group which seduces fools with technolibertarian narrative of financial liberation to keep the scam running. (13/)

These are comparables cryptoassets can be compared to. Needless to say none of these products are a place any rational person should park their money. They're all variations of gambling, scams or negative-expected return schemes.

Run away from crypto as fast as you can.

/fin