brypto

The majority of people in the world (I’d guess 95%+) are indifferent to or dislike speculation

If you make products that are explicitly around financial speculation, you cede a massive TAM

But it’s unclear how to win real users. So the industry accepts the local maxima — higher floor, lower ceiling

Attention competition leads to lowest common denominator: speculation is a natural final form. 

People that have the most attention to spend are the 5% that are post-economic or are under/unemployed. These same people drive social norms & conversations on platforms like this one. 

You’re right that most people won’t speculate because they’re already on an edge of not having enough time or money or both. 

So to compete for attention you need an element of speculation, but it needs to be nearly no-cost for it to feel not like speculation. That is the cost of general attention now. The only way to keep though is to either build tools or create story. 

It’s clear most products are only built with immediate attention in mind because people are still stuck on lean start up mentality in a post-zirp + post-attention based Internet economy. Once someone puts something together that has a door of speculation to fuel growth of something larger other people will figure this out