It's also worth considering that from an ignore-the-fundamentals, macro-tealeaves perspective, the investment class has subtly, unremarkedly shifted from talking about "bitcoin" to talking about "crypto." This is due primarily to Elon Musk tweeting about Dogecoin, thereby forcing everyone who goes to cocktail parties to have a cocktail-conversation-level understanding of the differences between Bitcoin and Dogecoin, and NFTs, which have forced a cocktail-conversation-level understanding of digital assets.

If you care about money, Bitcoin has ceased to be "moon money." It is now a deflationary cryptocurrency asset with scaling problems, ESG issues and poor fulfillment of its "store of value" use-case. You don't need to know more than that. You can hate on Bitcoin, NFTs, Dogecoin, the whole ecosystem without understanding more than "Bitcoin sucks at its job."

But if you're even slightly more curious you go "what if Bitcoin didn't suck at its job?" And now all of a sudden you're critically examining the difference between Bitcoin and Dogecoin. If you so much as glance at it you go "why is this one 43 cents and this one forty three thousand dollars?" you'll discover there's been enough time for every major investment bank to have a primer giving you reasons. It likely has a few other terms in it and even the aggressively incurious end up doing more learning.

And when you do that you discover that nearly everything runs on Ethereum.

So you've already subtly accepted cryptocurrency as an asset class. You may not like it, you may never own it, you may hate it, but it's a "class" not a "tulip bubble" so you can't casually disregard it. You have to thoughtfully disregard it which means now you're analyzing the fundamentals of blockchain utility rather than bah humbugging it into oblivion and it doesn't take too long to recognize that there's a lot of utility that the first movers are already colonizing.

It's better to be wrong together than right alone. If you, professional investor, moved into Bitcoin in 2012 you were right alone. If you, professional investor, are looking at Ethereum in 2021?

At worst, you're in good company.

AOL was the Internet once, at least as far as a large group of insufferable 'boomers are concerned.

That's probably how it ended up buying Time Warner. Didn't end up working out, but it sure helped feed the IPOs of Google, Facebook and Amazon.