But if you think this is just a rerun of the dotcom boom, with discord channels replacing AOL chat rooms and cyrptocurrencies replacing AOL, CSCO, and YHOO, you might've missed an important detail. The dotcom boom of the late 90's was about technologies. People speculated on stocks which represented ownership interests in the companies and their technologies. Today's cryptocurrencies are not so much about the technology -- blockchains, smart contracts, and consensus mechanisms -- as they are about financial engineering and financial leverage. In that way, they're more similar to the junk bond/LBO boom of the 1980's and the conglomerate boom of the 1960's. If you read about letter stocks, zero coupon convertible bonds, and pay-in-kind bonds, you'd find eerie similarities to today's crypto tokenomics.