In the past, the crypto market was profitable because of large-scale wealth creation: Retail investors made money → exited the space → outsiders deposited funds to join → less informed capital took the other side. Now, there hasn’t been a large-scale wealth effect for a long time, leading to retail investors losing everything (like me) → altcoins no longer generate profits, even causing losses → and failing to attract outside capital. So the old capital flow pattern was: the market distributed money to retail investors, who then lost it to whales/smart money, and then re-deposited (because they’d tasted success).