One of the first clients for my web company, early 2000s, was a Greek who started a private clinic in Bucharest. It was very early for this type of services and being first paid off for him, he got to sell his network of clinics pretty well, 15 years later. As we worked together for his web identity, we became friends and, one day, he confessed why he started this business here, in Romania.
"You know, I've been a stock broker for 8 years in Greece. Then, one morning, a cab driver started to talk to me about investing. About putting money in the stock market. When I heard him, I knew it's time to get out. Too crowded. And that's how I decided to invest in a small country, in a very narrow niche."
If Everybody Talks About Something, Is This A Bubble Sign?
For years, the wide dissemination of a specific type of information served as a symptom of its imminent crash. The more people know about something, the sooner that something will come to its demise.
It went the same with the "dot com bubble": back then, people will be thrilled about everything that had a ".com" in its name, just as today people are FOMO-ing on every company that changes its name by adding "Blockchain" to it.
But is this a sign of an imminent bubble of the blockchain technology? Is this a sign of a market crash?
To be honest, I used to answer "yes" to those questions. But not anymore. Now I usually answer with "maybe".
Why?
Because the paradigm changed significantly. We're not living in the same context we used to live 30 years ago, when the dot com bubble formed and popped.
What changed?
1. Access To Investment Vehicles
With the proliferation of exchanges, it's becoming easier and easier to move your money in and around digital assets. 30 years ago, investing into a startup was a time consuming and most of the time difficult process, reserved to a few. But now you can buy insane amounts of digital assets in seconds. Most of these assets aren't yet proven by the markets and they are merely promises, but so were those early startups. Probably 10% of the traded tokens today have a use case, a community and an ecosystem (hint: STEEM is one of them).
2. Information Travels Faster Than Ever
Back during the dot com bubble, we were reading about fancy startups on printed magazines, or we were watching news on TV. Both processes - time consuming, again. Now we read about a new token in 3 minutes, probably on our mobile phones, we read the white paper in half an hour and we make the investment in 1 minute. So, in less than an hour - the length of a traditional reportage in the TV golden era - we already informed ourselves, made a decision and acted upon it. This speed doesn't ensure we can't make mistakes, and truth is many of the top 10 coins right now are mistakes, but because things can move so fast, we can correct faster. That means the potential losses are way, way smaller than in the dot com bubble (but most likely inevitable).
3. Assets Are Thinner
Back in the dot com bubble, you would have to fill in a term sheet in order to get a slice of the company shares, a process conducted by a lawyer and validated by a notary. Then you would get a stack of papers stating that you own something in that company. But today, with the tokenization of pretty much everything, assets are way "thinner" than that. Which means you can manage them faster and easier. That lowers the cost of ownership of an asset to almost zero, making it easier to hold. Surprisingly, that makes the lifetime of an asset longer, a situation often translated in crypto lingo by the famous: HODL. From an administrative point of view, it's way easier to hold on to your assets now, so the challenge is mostly psychological.
So, although we do live very enthusiastic times, and exaggerations are popping up every day -or every hour - I do think the old saying about taxi drivers talking about blockchain should not be a reason to get out of the market.
On the contrary: the more taxi drivers get in, the higher the liquidity.
I'm a serial entrepreneur, blogger and ultrarunner. You can find me mainly on my blog at Dragos Roua where I write about productivity, business, relationships and running. Here on Steemit you may stay updated by following me 
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