> BTC is helping a ton of people right now, as evidenced by the rapidly increasing demand and money flowing into Bitcoin investment.

Not making a judgement either way on BTC's success but what you've highlighted there isn't evidence. An artificially inflated market based on speculation would show the exact same signs.

It was never meant to be a value store. First sentence of the whitepaper: "A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution".

I'm talking about what Bitcoin is, not what the white paper speculated it could become. Descriptive vs. prescriptive.

> a lot of extreme Bitcoin hate on this site

I don't think this is the case, it feels more like people here are no longer as easily charmed by the whole buzzword catalogue surrounding bitcoin. This switch from everyone starting a new cryptocurrency and "X, but on blockchain" dominating the discourse towards a more critical view probably just feels more extreme than it really is.

I don't think there's a community on the internet that is as anti-crypto as HN. At least I've never seen one.

Instead it's being manipulated by a few large whales.

For a decade?

There really is no alternative for where to park your money in 2021 unless you want to buy real-estate or stocks both of which come with their own massive set of problems.

So virtual asset, with multiple price swings, much wider than real estate during housing crisis, is the place to park money?

The trend has very consistently been for BTC to increase in value (helped by USD decreasing in value). There are only "wide" price swings at very high resolution.

What's the major downside of parking 1% of your money in a volatile asset that may or may not yield great returns? (Am long BTC)