Fakecoins and Microsoft (Rallying Markets Based on a False Perception of Value)
Related: There is No Such Thing as 'Cryptocurrency' and Please Stop Referring to It as Cryptocurrency
Bitcoin "value":
How many of the pertinent BTC "exchanges" collapsed in recent years, leaving customers without anything? Where is the "material" value, other than some bits on a disk, high electricity bills, and maybe some 'paper trail' on a Web site? Microsoft is enabling these 'cryptocurrency' scams and cons.
Microsoft share "value":
Asymptotic distributions or such curves typically represent the rise and fall of pyramid schemes, like the one run by the wife of Jim Zemlin (of the Linux Foundation). There's no "free lunch" and "real" money does not grow on trees; it must be tied to assets and/or labour.
What is this Microsoft share "value" based on? Lots of plagiarism on a disk (lawsuits are still piling up), high electricity bills, and bribed scholars pretending that chatbots are the best thing since the steam-based locomotive [1, 2].
The bubble was terrible. VCs and scammers scooped up billions from pension funds and other institutional investors and wasted it on obviously doomed startups. But after all that “irrational exuberance” burned away, the ashes proved a fertile ground for new growth.Contrast that bubble with, say, cryptocurrency/NFTs, or the complex financial derivatives that led up to the 2008 financial crisis. These crises left behind very little reusable residue. The expensively retrained physicists whom the finance sector taught to generate wildly defective risk-hedging algorithms were not able to apply that knowledge to create successor algorithms that were useful. The fraud of the cryptocurrency bubble was far more pervasive than the fraud in the dotcom bubble, so much so that without the fraud, there’s almost nothing left. A few programmers were trained in Rust, a very secure programming language that is broadly applicable elsewhere. But otherwise, the residue from crypto is a lot of bad digital art and worse Austrian economics.
AI is a bubble, and it’s full of fraud, but that doesn’t automatically mean there’ll be nothing of value left behind when the bubble bursts. WorldCom was a gigantic fraud and it kicked off a fiber-optic bubble, but when WorldCom cratered, it left behind a lot of fiber that’s either in use today or waiting to be lit up. On balance, the world would have been better off without the WorldCom fraud, but at least something could be salvaged from the wreckage.