Imagine that you live in an unstable third world country and that your currency is highly volatile and generally devalues against USD. Imagine that most of your local potential financial assets aretied to your currency and suffer from the same issues.
Now imagine that you have the choice to invest in these fiat backed assets, or you can buy universally accepted "stores of value" like gold or Bitcoin.
Nice move with the crypto graph, but a "store of value" is typically held over years, not a few months, and crypto year on year has been a very good store of value so far!
I'm not arguing with your analysis in traditional first world markets. But there do exist places that put a lot more value onto things like universal acceptance, not linked to the national economy, relative stability etc. than just raw returns.
You can store your wealth in anything at all, but if it increases at lesser rate than inflation or cost of living, what's the point ? You might as well take in fiat currency and put it in a shoe box under your bed, it's not going to increase over time relative to the general economy.
The point of the article is that gold is a short term storage solution to get your wealth temporarily out of volatile markets, it's not an investment vehicle for long term profits. But it has been, and will be, around for a long long time.
How many of the 1500+ crypto are going be around in 5 years time ? surely you don't think all of them ? That's the point, even though gold is a crappy long term investment, it's more than likely still gonna be here long after all those coins are dead and forgotten. Not very good for long term storage in other words.
Maybe 50-250. They'll drop like flies.
I really hope they do, and just leave the ones worth buying, ones that serve a real purpose.
Unfortunately I'm sure that new ones will come along, equally unworthy. In fact, the more crypto goes mainstream, the worse this tide may become. It's this kind of thing that I hope regulation can help to mitigate. It's also for this reason that I strongly support NEO's much higher (than Ethereum's) token establishment fees. Seen a bad DApp on NEO yet?