Yes, there was a period of time, mostly after the ICO crash, where the market was relatively quiet and most people in the space worked on interesting technological problems. I don't want to get into arguments about the usefulness of blockchains and web3, but the intention of developers was not to scam consumers, at least not explicitly or from the outset. Now the intention of most projects is explicitly to rug pull and scam people, mostly due to the NFT craze.
Just cycles repeating. Remember 2013 then it was all kinds of shitcoins when the term shitcoin was most used, happened. Peercoin, FeatherCoin, AmsterdamCoin, TitsAndAssCoin. They all pumped and dumped. Somebody looking into crypto late 2013 would have found 99% scam coins. Same thing in 2017, 99% scam ICOs. Today its 99% NFT and token scams.
To be clear though, any kind of investing into items with no practical value is fundamentally a ponzi scheme. For someone that buys low and sells high there's always someone that buys high. Be it on the stock market, forex, crypto exchanges or whatever the NFT scene is doing these days.
How do you differentiate a crypto rugpull or a company going bankrupt after all the funding has been drained out by its owner? Or fiat devalued by inflation? In principle it's all different sides of the same coin, pun intended.
1) Stocks in companies have value not just because people buy and sell them to each other at higher and higher prices, but because companies add value to the world, and generate income.
2) the difference between a crypto rug pull and a company being drained of its resources is that the second one would result in a police investigation, and fraud charges. It would be illegal, because of the laws that protect investors from exactly that situation.
If "It's all the same" then why invest in crypto at all? It's way riskier, and had a lot more negative externalities.
1) That's debatable. Companies are after all just people doing stuff. You don't own the people and they could all just quit one day. Maybe you own a part of the company assets, but these days with remote work and internet companies that can be close to nothing. I don't see many stocks paying out dividends, but I suppose that's a thing.
2) Illegal's never stopped anyone from doing anything, and I don't see how the crypto version isn't fraud too. But in both these cases you can fly to a non extradition country with your newfound fuck-you-money, leaving the investors up shit creek without damages.
Crypto has some benefits over the stock market, it's open 24/7 so it doesn't discriminate against anyone, and it's more volatile so one can get higher returns (well, or losses) with less of an investment without having to resort to options or margin which are just as risky. It also has more defined and predictable bull/bear markets in relation to bitcoin halvings.
I don't really see the two markets as too different though. One has just had more time to become more rigged for wall street.
But people do do stuff. At the very least, every day the company is changed in some small way by employees innovating. One share of apple is not the same thing it was ten years ago because apple is not the same thing.
BTC on the other hand is not a productive asset. It’s value cannot change by the underlying thing changing. Instead it’s value can only change in regards to how much people want it.
Now?