WeWork, once valued close to 50 billion, now is less than 10 billion. If you are a stockholder, you might want to bail out before it’s too late or most likely you already did, you spent 50K purchasing their stocks and now you only get 10K back, $50K out $10K in, you lost $40k, where did your $40K go? It lost its market value, everyone in the stock market should know this, you lost your money! Ok but wait a second, a pile of $40K cash is a real thing, it cannot just disappear by itself, it has to be somewhere, where did my $40k go?
It went to the pocket of “MONEY MAKERS” on Wall Street.
WeWork is just one recent example of busted stocks, there were hundreds of them before WeWork, each busted stock or market crash equaled a huge wealth transfer from the banking accounts of mass stockholders to the pockets of selected few TPTB. And they will be hundred of more of such wealth transfer in the future too, Wall Street can create a company from thin air and hype it to billion dollar value then kill it after IPO, they can repeat this cycle for unlimited times whenever they feel like it.
When the fist stock market was opened 400 years ago, it may be based on the idea of borrowing money from the people and returning with some benefits for helping out. But soon, the philosophy evolved to how we we can borrow money but never have to return them… fast forward to modern ear, it has become “siphon” money away from your bank account whether you know it or not, you don’t invest in the stock market, but your retirement or pension fund is, you are already in it and your banking account is already being tapped.
I may sound a bit cynical here but it’s not too far away from the truth either. Since we are talking about bitcoins and cryptos, these are fundamentally different financial products. Bitcoin, for example, is not only a digital currency, also a currency with limited circulations, there are a fixed amount of 21 millions bitcoins available due to the mathematics behind it, 21 millions of bitcoins, that's all we have here in this world, that's why people are mining it, one mined, one gone for good! This limited supply of bitcoins also explained why some people like Buffett dislike Bitcoin almost instantly, because it’s an end game to them, they cannot create bitcoin, think about WeWork and launch an IPO and suck money away from other people.
A lot scary news about bitcoin and cryptos were posted in this thread, they are all true and horrifying, the bitcoin and crypto market is like a lawless wide west now, there is no denying about this. But we don’t use the rampant crimes and lawlessness to discredit the gold rush as a whole, we should not use those horrible stories to write off bitcoins either. The gold rush created real wealth in that era, bitcoins and crypos are creating wealth now.
I mentioned gold, which is a rare metal with a limited supply on earth like bitcoin, also like bitcoin, you can mine gold but you cannot create them, the similarities are here, and interestingly Buffet doesn’t believe in “Gold” either just like he doesn't believe in "Bitcoin", coincidence? No I think not!
