The distinction isn’t meaningless, it’s actually vitally important. The thing is, we’ve been here before, hundreds if not thousands of times, with the stock market and other speculative bubbles. Once a big enough entity decides to cut their losses and bail with whatever they can get, all that “value” disappears and there’s no inherent value of the asset itself to fall back on. So it has been with other crypto crashes in the past few years.
Granted, this is generally true of fiat as well, we just have a lot more people and hopefully some safeguards holding up that value.
andrewrgross@slrpnk.net 1 year ago
I’m sorry it feels that way, that’s not my intention.
I think it’s a meaningful distinction because my understanding is that many large matter holders are early adopters who acquired coins at at basement prices that them became highly valued when crypto took off. These people, as I understand it, have a different spending pattern than we associate with conventional wealth. They may shuffle their coins between digital assets with limited conversion into real world good and services, because inside the block chain they’re billionaires, but if they tried to buy a house or a vacation they’re forced to find buyers at prices that are reflective of the value among crypto holders, but not nearly as high to those outside the system who they’d need to complete cash transactions.