What if ETH price goes up to $1,000,000,000 and the dollar becomes green toilet paper? These guys will become super rich compared to the average person.
I think this comment fundamentally misconstrues the nature of wealth. You're not a trillionaire if you own two thousand shares of stock "valued" at a half billion each, unless there are enough buyers out there to buy them all at that price, and you sell them at that price. That net worth isn't any more real than market cap is real. It's an artifice, a fake number found buy multiplying an instantaneous transaction price for one transaction times the theoretical maximum number of transactions, without considering how additional transactions will impact market price.
Dogecoin went from 0.01 cents to 1.5 cents. There are something like 21 trillion of them, so the founder is technically a billionaire because he has billions of them. But they're still effectively worthless, he can't actually sell billions of them at that price. If he sold more than a few thousand per day, the price would plummet because there's just not that much demand for a meme coin. He didn't actually make anything of value. He doesn't control a profit-generating enterprise. He has no capital, no real estate, no employees, no business model, no nothing. All he has is trillion digitally signed files that he made on his home computer, and he's managed to sell some of them for around a penny. Is he really a billionaire?
I think not. That link posted above suggests that the originator of Etherium was briefly worth more than Mark Zuckerberg, who controls a majority stake in one of the largest and most profitable companies in history. Does anyone really believe that a minority stake in Etherium can make someone wealthier than the Zuck?
So no, I'm not worried about the "green toilet paper" scenario. Tulip bulbs went though this same phase, where the price of a single lot of bulbs times the number of lots in the market far exceeded the GDP of the nation. Just because SOME people are willing to pay outlandish prices for tulips does not mean that person has more wealth than the entire nation does. He couldn't possibly sell them all at that price because there isn't that much money. It's ridiculous from every angle. Wealth is not determined by market price.
Wealth generates cash flow. Power confers control. Crypto-bros have neither. All they have are modern day penny stocks they've effectively pumped up to naive investors. Remember that for every buyer there needs to be a seller, and every coin sold is someone deciding to cash out of their GDP-sized tulip bulb stake for actual dollars that can be used to pay rent and buy bread.
The stock market works the exact same way, btw. If your vtsax balance is one million dollars, you're only a millionaire if there are enough buyers for you to liquidate at that price. By the time you're Warrren Buffet and you control tens of billions of dollars, finding that many buyers becomes problematic. If you tried to sell it all, you'd crash the market and destroy your own wealth along with everyone else's.
It's like the entire country has forgotten that liquidity is a thing. Market cap isn't a real value. Crypto billionaires aren't really billionaires unless they can deceive people long enough to liquidate their holdings. The more people sell, the harder it is for them to do that. Hence the fanatical HODL mentality. Can't have anyone selling and ruining the gravy train for the sellers, that would ruin their artificial scarcity.
It's a giant economic comedy, and I love it. Hollywood is going to make some great movies about this, in a few years.