Of course, it doesn't always go up...

I think you have an oddly negative bias.

Spoken like someone has no clue what they are talking about and just throwing out jargon

At the extreme if nobody was providing this service, investors (e.g. pension funds), wouldn't be confident that they can buy/sell their assets as needed in size and at the right price... and because of that, in aggregate stocks would be worth less, and companies wouldn't be able to raise as much capital.

The theoretical model is: - You want to have efficient primary markets that allow companies to raise a lot of assets at the best possible prices - To enable efficient primary markets, investors want efficient secondary markets (so they don't need to buy and hold forever, but feel they can sell) - To enable efficient secondary markets, you need many folks that are in the business of XTX ... it just so happens that XTX is quite good at it, and so they do a lot of this work.

If a company wants to expand and build a new factory (say to provide more, cheaper pharmaceuticals to more people), it needs capital. If you have cash but there’s deflation, you might just keep your cash under your pillow because it’s worth more every year. If instead we have an inflation, and so you have a disincentive to leave the cash under your pillow, you invest it (give to that company to fund its factory). That’s good for society.

If people lost faith, it would lose value.

Mild inflation (say 2-3pct a year) is considered generally good by economists. It’s an incentive to go and invest the money productively or spend that money on goods and services (which is good for growing the economy). Deflation in contrast would create an incentive to hoard money (just keep little papers with no productive value).

People are most definitely buying stocks for the reason I mentioned. There’s a reason why the pension fund of the teachers of California, the pension fund of the teachers of Texas, and your 401k holds stocks. It’s not because they are collectibles with a lot of hype. It’s because they get a claim on future profits at (expected to be, on average, over the long run) a discount. Of course there are people who have no clue what they’re buying or why it works and just buy something… but that doesn’t mean the thing they’re buying doesn’t have a fundamental value connected to reality.

Stocks give you a legal right to the assets and future profits of a company - a legal right enforced by the government (i.e. men with guns).

Crypto gives you no such right. In crypto you just hope someone else will pay more for it later. In that sense crypto is similar to baseball cards, and slightly similar to gold (gold has some industrial “actual” uses, but its high price is really driven by cultural perception of value.)

Conveniently after the explosions, NS2 became one of the few working ways to get gas to Europe, and Putin offered to deliver gas via it. https://www.aljazeera.com/amp/news/2022/10/12/putin-offers-t...

That’s way he blew up what he blew up. To force Europe’s hand on NS2.

Issue is blockchain tech doesn't actually solve anything