If you were around during that time, you will recall that the 1990's were an era of new money and many new, young millionaires. Many also went on to become billionaires.
Not only was it new money. It was relatively easy money. Of course what I am talking about is the meteoric rise of the Internet and the dot.com boom. The kids were going to redefine how money could be made, and they were going to break all the rules doing it.
What you essentially had were "businesses" that were built on code, not foundations. There were no brick and mortar buildings with executive offices on the top floor of a New York skyrise. There was no real product mostly, and no revenues to speak of.
Yet many of these startups attracted the attentions of massive numbers of high profile, and deep pocketed investors who helped to take these "phantom" companies public, amassing hundreds of billions of dollars in the process, and making a lot of people very rich, very quickly.
Considering that none of these dot.coms had any real money from their businesses to speak of, how was it made possible to pay for talent that could write the code, build the product, and keep everything running?
Don't give the employees a salary in cash. Give it to them in the form of shares of stock in the company they worked for. As so many companies stock prices were surging up into the $100's of dollars per share, for many of these young kids out of college and entering the workforce for the first time, this seemed like the opportunity of a lifetime.
Many parents were worried, and rightly so. But the advice they gave to their kids to proceed with caution and not get ahead of themselves simply fell on deaf ears. The kids would simply tell mom and dad they did not know how things worked now. It was a new time, a new era, and the old ways were out of date.
The idea was that you would just bust your tail for about 10 years, amass your fortune, and then live out the rest of your days comfortably pursuing your own passions and dreams.
The reality was, as it was learned, that the parents were right, and the old ways were still proven things. There is an "order" in the world of finance and economies. People who do things that produce things that produce money make money. Those who don't are not entitled to the riches.
In other words, there is no cheating the system. It is just not how it works. As our parents so often told us when we were kids, "Money does not grow on trees," as much as we shook our heads and rolled our eyes, at some point we know that to be as true as it ever was.
It was true then, and it is true now. Money does not grow on trees.
In order for money to grow and have any value there needs to be something to back it up. Something to put a value to it. Before the 1970's it was gold. Nowadays it is GDP. At the very least a business or a company cannot have any value if it does not produce any revenue. The value of a business is based on how much money it makes. And if a business does not make money, it has no value at all.
The idea behind the dot.com era did not change this reality, and the reality was that many of these kids lost all of their money and had to start all over. The dot.com era went bust because it was all built on lies and fantasy. It went bust because it did not follow the rules. It went bust because the idea of how the dot.coms intended to change the status quo could not change the fundamental basis for wealth creation.
Money really doesn't grow on trees.
When I view the cryptocurrency fad, I see similarities. And pardon my use of the word "fad." Let's just say it (crypto) is gaining popularity and that's why I chose that word. I see the same mindset among many people who are adopting the idea of cryptocurrency as we saw with the dot.com era.
I see the same concept being employed here. This is the new way. The old way is out of date.
I see the same trend of people putting in little to gain a lot, and expecting big rewards for what amounts to nothing. I see the same lack of bricks and mortar, and product, and revenues that are supposed to support and generate massive amounts of money for anyone who participates. I see the same idea that somehow the system can be bucked, and we can throw out the fundamentals of how money and wealth is actually made in this world.
I see trouble in the making for a lot of people. Just like what happened to the people who thought the dot.com era was the wave of the future.
The one thing to keep in mind is that during the dot.com era there were thousands of companies created. Tens of thousands of companies created. Not all of them could succeed. Not all of them would succeed. But in the short term, many of them amassed billions of dollars anyway at the start.
How many new coins and tokens are there being created? Right now there are probably thousands of them. All of them are the next big thing. All of them will make you rich beyond imagination. None of them have anything really backing them up. Just like the dot.coms. They are shells which enjoy massive gains in popularity and investment, that just like the dot.coms, will eventually get to a point at which everyone realizes they have no value at all and anyone who still has the coins in their pockets will lose all of their money.
This commentary is not to diss cryptocurrency. It is simply to get your mind wrapped around what is the best strategy going forward. What do you look for in a coin to invest in? What things make one coin better than the other? And what thing makes it more likely that a coin will actually survive and become something more? Something genuine?
I want you to fully understand something here. You will never get rich if you do not have something to show for it. It is simply not the way it works. Rules be damned, the rules are the rules, and you are not going to be able to get around that.
The dot.com era was a bust. But it was not a total bust. There were survivors. Who survived? The ones who followed the rules. The ones who understood you cannot make money out of thin air. If you cannot figure out how to generate revenue, you die. Plain and simple. The ones who survived figured out how to generate revenue and create actual businesses. The ones who survived were the ones who created a product that not only provided value to the user, but made it valuable in the eyes of investors and other people willing to put their money out there to support the business in the form of generating revenue.
Cryptocurrency is so similar to the dot.com era it is almost haunting. Most crypto will die. Most crypto does not stand a chance, and most crypto investors will lose all of their money.
The trick is in finding which one most closely follows the rules. Which one will be able to generate a revenue stream. Which one will have utility and provide the most value to the end user. The trick is in figuring out which one will do something to make it valuable.
As for the sad reality? Most will get it wrong. Just like what happened in the dot.com era. Most people got it terribly wrong. I have said it time and time again, and will say it a million times more...
There is no such thing as a get rich quick scheme, and if you try to buck the system and break the rules, you will spend far more time making up for lost time than enjoying the time riches eventually provides you.
For most people, riches do not fall into your hands just because. You still have to work for it. That rule will never change. Otherwise you are nothing more than a dog chasing his tail. And the dog never actually gets his tail.
Everyone is looking for a profit in a coin for investing, well, of course, its growth, not a fall