Time. They need time.

I read Galbraith's The Great Crash of 1929 (written in '55 and considered the gold standard) and it was all about speculation so feverish that little old ladies and shoe shine boys were interested in the stock market. But fuck you, Galbraith, watch an eTrade commercial some time. Now that the lucky have a 401k or a Roth, we're all fuckin' shoe shine boys now.

I read Liaquat Ahamed's Lords of Finance: The Bankers who Broke the World (Pulitzer winner, 2010) and it's got more than its fare share of little old ladies and shoe shine boys in the stock market. But it also focuses on the hyperinflation of the Weimar Republic and how it was an active choice by a central banker who pursued it relentlessly in an attempt to inflate away Germany's war debt. More than that, it lists a few historical prices: GM peaked at $103 and went down to $7. RCA went from the 90s to like $3. That's two orders of magnitude in the space of a year or two for a pair of blue chips that pretty fuckin' much defined stability for the broader stock market for decades.

Even now fuckin' Ford is at like $8.43. Here's the problem: when you look up "historical" data you get shit back to like 2011. Nobody even fuckin' remembers the Great Recession. They sure as shit don't remember the Nifty Fifty or The End of Equities or the march of fucking despair that was The Great Depression or why so to these bullshit business majors, "bubble" is this abstract miasma of tulips and sock puppets with microphones but fuck you, mutherfuckers, buy low sell high is a 400-year-old scam played by confidence men who, if they hold onto their money long enough, will convince their friends and neighbors that they've always been destined to be rich.

You know what's wrong with the crypto movement right now? It's full of skeezy pioneers like the '49ers who rushed out to San Francisco. it's full of the basement dwelling scumbags whose primary skillset started with the ability to make free phone calls. It's full of the ne'er-do-wells with nothing to lose and everything to gain that aren't interested in socially-acceptable grift. That means people who worship scumbags like John McAfee until they get blown out of the water by people who worship scumbags like the Winkelvoss Twins until they get blown out of the water by people who worship scumbags like Alan Greenspan.

If you look up GM's IPO, you'll see the whole of the Intarwebs declaring it was fuckin' Nov 17, 2010. If you say "no really, internet, when did they first go public" they'll say "no ferreal Nov 17 2010." Which is true - that's the point where GM clawed its way out of delisting thanks to thirteen point four fucking billion dollars from Ma and Pa Taxpayer.

GM went from $93 in 2000 to $1 in 2009 but you won't find a single person on the planet scolding you for investing in GM stock. They may question your judgment but they won't cast aspersions for your immorality. Which means people who are playing in crypto are the ones that are immune from the shaming of the broader finance industry.

There's a bunch of kids in my machining program. Talkin' 16 year olds, 17 year olds. I overheard one of them tell another that he was taking his graduation money and putting it in Bitcoin, Ethereum and Monero because he figures there's more growth potential.

The "movement" is lacking time. That's it. When George Gilder answers "what's after Google" with "ethereum" the writing is on the fucking wall.