Not a Bubble. Investors were right about dotcom.

This will be a short post. People are comparing Cryptocurrencies generally and Bitcoin specifically to the dotcom bubble of the early 2000s.

But I had this thought earlier this week. The early dotcom era was not a bubble. Stay with me here. The dot-com era did usher in a new age of commerce and communication. And the old school powers were all largely upended.

If it wasn’t a bubble what was it? a lot of people lost money.

What you had was a high stakes poker game, not a bubble.

Think of it this way, 8 people sit down to play poker, they all have ok hands, some even have good hands. At the end, there will only be one winner. How do you bet the first rounds? You fold or you stay in and match the bets? You would probably stay in and keep betting. If everyone does that you end up with a very large pot of money indeed. Now at the end of the game, the final card gets flipped over, and there are 7 losers. But you have one big winner.

That is just brinksmanship. I am going to spend on the theory I am winning and hope to force you to fold.

So maybe pets.com had an 11% chance of being where people bought pet supplies. Maybe it was 2%. But the day it folded everyone that bet on them winning went to zero.

Same for Peapod and groceries. Some for eToys and stuff for your kids. Many of these were betting on great domain names, and then using that to get enough cash to build a business from zero. They were wrong.

But you CAN do all of that today online.

Amazon Fresh will deliver your groceries. Netflix will deliver your movies. Amazon will deliver your toys. Uber and Door Dash will deliver your food. Everything you used to do with a newspaper is now online. Shop for cars at cars.com, carguru.com etc. Shop for jobs at Monster, Indeed, Dice, Linkedin etc. News, Opinions, Classifieds all are online.

Litterally every section of a newspaper from 1998 is now an ENTIRE SECTOR of the online economy.

The newspaper industry has been destroyed. Yellow pages dead. Blockbuster is dead. Borders is dead. Barnes & Noble is fading. Best buy is in trouble. Sears, Kmart, all the Mall Anchors are facing what has been called the retail apocalypse.

Amazon stock you could have bought for $5 in 2000-2001 is not worth over $1200 last I checked. that is 24,000% growth.

The people who bet everything that dot-com would change the world, they were not wrong.

So that brings us to today. The people that are betting that crypto will change the world. They are not wrong.

10-15 years from now you will only have memories of certain companies and industries that you know. Chase. Wells Fargo. Western Union. Paypal. Visa, Mastercard, US Dollar as Reserve Currency.

The harder read is which cryptocurrency will be the winner at the end when the last card is flipped.