[time_to_smile]

> I don't understand how intelligent people can continue to believe this stuff is the future of finance.

My experience is that all of the really intelligent people interested in crypto did leave after the ~2012 wave of excitement. At that time when you saw people give talks on crypto they were almost entirely technical with very little focus (or interest) on becoming rich. That was when the people involved tended to be technical idealists. I didn't buy that crypto was the future then, but I wanted to be wrong.

Fast forward to ~2017 during the next crypto boom and the conversation was around the non-technical people at technical companies getting excited. People did believe crypto was going to become the currency of the world, so there was still some idealism, but it was mainly about getting in to get rich. By this wave a good chunk of the idealists I knew were entirely disillusioned.

Then the 3rd wave which just happened to correlated with a massive injection of money in the market by the Fed. At this point it was just literally get-rich-quick dreamers with more dollars in their hands than sense. Nobody I know who has gotten in during this period even has a coherent vision of what the future looks like, they just have too much money and think crypto is the way to get insanely rich one day. It's also when people completely unrelated to tech started getting involves. People who don't even know how to use a wallet, and rely 100% on 3rd parties to manage all of it.

People are holding on to crypto for the same silly reasons that coworkers of mine keep all their vested stock in companies that have dropped 50%+ in value over the last year. It's because they earnest believe that the era of low interest, free money is the norm. They believe this current macro is just a blip, and if they just hodl a bit longer it everything will go back to "normal".