Comment by mrtksn
4 years ago
Where the money was coming from when Facebook, Google, Youtube, Twitter etc were really good places that were free to use? They all were working to "make the world a better place" and not making money as they were burning billions each year, challenging the traditional and profitable companies. With Amazon prices were amazing, you had unlimited rights and not only buying but also selling was great. Bezos was worth quite a much but his company never made any profit up until a few years back.
The news business was destroyed in the process, just as the retail and once the establishment lost its ground the money began poring in. From 90's up to late 2000's the internet was amazing as everything was paid by people who were about to reap their investment back a decade later.
My point is, following the money is tricky. Maybe we are at the verge of another change where the costs are payed by crypto bros who will be splitting countries and starting wars once they are done growing the landscape.
> Where the money was coming from when Facebook, Google, Youtube, Twitter etc were really good places that were free to use?
I don’t think this is very mysterious. It’s coming from investors who are spending money in the expectation of future profits as the business scales and reaches greater efficiencies and increases monetization.
In the case of this cryptocurrency there’s no obvious point where these tokens suddenly become useful. People only buy them because somebody else will be willing to buy them later (which, of course, relies on ever-increasing amounts of money entering the system). With a stock you are at least theoretically anchored to real world value, since you can buy out a company with stocks and then liquidate the company’s assets.
All these coins and projects have a mission statement and high level overview on how they think it will be useful in the future. It's up to you to believe them but they do have a proposal.
The stocks are more opaque in that regard, they are required to publish some declaration and financial disclosure but explaining why you need to invest in that company stock often comes down to CEO's appearing in the press. Countless internet ventures died in the process.
> All these coins and projects have a mission statement and high level overview on how they think it will be useful in the future.
The thing I like about Dogecoin is that it's at least honest: it's not selling itself as anything more than a token with a price that will go up if more people buy it.
> Where the money was coming from when Facebook, Google, Youtube, Twitter etc were really good places that were free to use? They all were working to "make the world a better place" and not making money as they were burning billions each year, challenging the traditional and profitable companies.
But they were visibly creating value. Seeing what my friends are up to and organising parties together is pleasant. Being able to find what you want on the internet in 1 second rather than 30 minutes is an obvious improvement to your life. So even if they weren't profitable in the short term, you could see that there was legitimate money to be made.