Why do people buy Bitcoin, Ethereum, or any one of the rest 25,000 tokens available today? Apparently, most of them are not doing it because they wish to help establishing an alternative financial system. Very few are buying those tokens to purchase products or services that only the creators of each token have to offer. They are buying crypto to become rich, or at least a lot more wealthier than they are.

Is this a flawed perception?

This is fed by the early stories conned by Bitcoin exchange promoters. The pizza guy, who sold a pizza worth of say $10 at the time for a few Bitcoins, that now is sitting on a fortune worth of hundreds of thousands of dollars. Right?

Wrong! The pizza guy sold his Bitcoins before they even worth enough to call himself wealthy. The stories coming from the very early days of crypto cannot be repeated today in any way. Established markets (currencies or tokens) are now quite mature; you won't buy a single unit for one, two, or even ten, or twenty cents that will worth a few years later hundreds or thousands of dollars. The market is already too scattered to achieve this - unless a giant like Facebook or Google was actively involved in the project. Even if loads of people would start entering the crypto-world, they would never select an unknown token to be their first purchase, even if it's priced at only a few cents.

You cannot become rich with crypto, unless you are already wealthy enough

Let's take the most optimistic projections on the price of Bitcoin. $100,000 a piece. Some even say $400,000 a piece. If you would sell your Bitcoins at that price - which is highly doubtful. Even at $400,000 price mark, you would need 2.5 Bitcoins to become a millionaire. However, even at the recent 12-month lows, you would need some $10,000 to buy those 2.5 Bitcoins. And $10,000 is nowhere near the term of 'pocket money' - let alone that today you would need over $35,000 to buy those 2.5 Bitcoins.

So, in the best case scenario, if you have only a few hundred dollars to throw into buying Bitcoin, you would be looking at some $30,000 to $40,000 at best. If you would count in deflation, that would be some $25,000 to $32,000 - you don't expect Bitcoin to go up to $400,000 within a few months, do you? Even with such a ROI though, you wouldn't call yourself wealthy, even by developing countries standards.

Crypto is not the same as stock in a company

Companies are developing and selling products and services, creating wealth for their stockholders, through profit. A company may stimulate demand for its stock by delivering results, or at least anticipation of results by introducing a successful product to the market. Such a development (or series of developments) may come even after years of a stock being traded. Market trends aside - that may temporarily increase the price of a stock - stock price in a profitable (or anticipated profitable) company will go up in the long term. A crypto token, with no apparent wealth creation aspect, will only go up through permanent market-making that will be artificially inflating its price.

And even then, it's the market-makers who will be making money, not investors.