In a group I'm part of, someone new asked "Do you have an exit strategy?" and then said (predictable) things like "crypto is a bubble that's driven by ignorant speculation, just like the 2000 dot com bust" and "how will you know when to sell, and how will you do it before everyone else?" Other members of the group are answering with variations of "I know it's not going to grow exponentially forever, but I'm in it for the utility of various coins." which is kind of where I sit, but I wanted to write something here to work out a bit more clearly what I really think.
First I think it's a mistake to think the price has no connection to anything real and is just driven by ignorance. People do see the utility of several coins, they see the utility of BTC as a store of value that is more flexible (programmable!) and private than other assets, they see the utility of the Ethereum global computer, even if today the most obvious stuff is a kind of Top Trumps for software-based lifeforms...
There are a bunch of people who have a vision of a blockchain-enabled world and are using coins for real world applications, they may be a bit shit at the moment, but they're getting better all the time. There are a bunch of people who just see numbers going up on a chart and want to play "buy low, sell high". There are a bunch of people this week who have been gifted paper wallets and so far haven't got past the idea that this piece of paper with a QR code and some strings of gobbledygook characters are the equivalent of a lottery ticket that they can cash in at any time. There are a bunch of people who are earning part of their living in a range of cryptocurrencies (hello Steem!) and using them as they were intended, as a means of exchanging value both programmatically and at micro-scales that just aren't feasible with fiat (or even BTC).
It's easy to posit that either you're sensible, pragmatic, rational, know how things are going to work out because most things end up the same OR you are a believer in snake oil, new paradigms, things that break the know laws of physics etc. But there is something in between.
In 2000 I wasn't worried about the web or the internet going away. It didn't collapse for me. I was never going to be a user of Pets.com. Some people made some money and some others lost a lot, from doing something well-known (buying shares) in unproven (but traditionally structured) enterprises. Lots of people in Silicon Valley lost jobs, but after a little licking of wounds, they were soon back at it, developing the social web that we're now familiar with. It was a part of the growth of the eco-system, but the whole thing didn't burn to the ground, just the bits that were a bit rotten anyway.
The question then is, are you going to get involved in risky innovative adventures or do you want to be stable and safe. That's a choice that's always going to be around. That was a choice in the three years after the dot-com bust as much as it was in the three years prior.
The main difference between crypto now and the web in 2000 is that we now have the web that we built in the years after 2000. There's huge overlap between investors, developers and users and we're all networked, globally, talking to each other nearly all the time. In 1999 the only conversations I had about the web were with people at work who'd read Sunday supplement articles about the rise of the NASDAQ and thought (wrongly) that I'd be a good source of advice about it all because I worked with computers. There's a bit of that about with stories of taxi drivers giving crypto advice and the Bitcoin Gift Token for Christmas thing, but it's way easier to educate yourself and have conversations with people who really know what they're doing and to get involved without making a big investment.
The only exit strategy I see is more of an exit philosophy: "If you can't stand the heat, stay out of the kitchen"
