> As for Bitcoin. Who cares if it is a bubble or a ponzi? People make money and gambling is a part of human nature.

People who want to use it as a currency and people preferring to avoid losing their investment in a dumb bubbles.

(it is more OK if it is a dumb gambling with what someone is considering as entertainment funds, but nearly noone is doing that)

In the money as credit model, the money supply expands and subtracts with economic activity. And the best suited money have price stability so the market of credit can focus "pricing" risk correctly.

This model of money could be supported by some kind of cryptocurrency, however right now the investors don't seem to have an appetite for sponsoring that sort of thing.

QED

If you're going to let the future determine your transaction patterns too much you will quite literally starve in the present. So even in that scenario there will be transactions and people will be happy to take your coin because they too hope that its value will go up. Obviously once a large fraction of world trade would be in a currency like that the currency itself would start to exhibit the same traits as the global economy and this effect would mostly cancel out any inherent properties.

Effectively: bitcoin was underpriced at the beginning to the point that it could only go up, the question is how far it will do that before it will have expanded to fill the niches where it fits. As soon as that has happened it will cease to increase.

That's the problem with this doublespeak, where people intentionally fool themselves into cognitive dissonance.

The whole point of currency is not investment. It's the exact opposite of investment. Currency is intended to have stable value over time, because it's whole point is to serve as a unit of account, store value, and serve as a medium to exchange value in an economy.

By it's very definition "investing" implies the expectation of profit. Think about it for a second: how can something intended to have a stable value be considered apt for speculation?

Point is that even with stable prices, there is plenty of room for speculators.

Even if you feel the need to equate crypto-things to bonds, first you need to argue why buying, say, bitcoins can be argued as lending money to someone, which makes no sense whatsoever.

Cryptos are nothing more than speculation vehicle, and it's pretty obvious that they are massively used as a pump-and-dump scheme. The only point in time where cryptos played a relevant role as a currency was way back in the silk road times where cryptos were used with the expectation of laundring transactions. That usecases quickly went out the door ages ago.

https://blockfi.com/an-introduction-to-rehypothecation-with-...

So some people of reinvented fractional reserve banking. But now with the problem that it’s unregulated, unbackstopped by a lender of last resort and ultimately through rehypothecation you’ve virtually eliminated any advantage gained by using blockchain technology.

I'm sure bitcoin purist will hate it, but afaik there's a lot of btc being held at exchanges (e.g. coinbase).

Technically instead of holding BTC there, you could be holding cBTC (value in a coinbase btc deposit account) and coinbase could issue cBTC loans similar to banks.

(The issue is that there's no backstop like in the real world, where central bank can step in as lender of last resort to avoid bank runs)

In my opinion, in most people's dictionary, these things describe the same things and when we use these words, there is no good, measurable way to classify them, we just act on our instincts, yet when we use words like investment, we feel safe and clever.

Good point about the currency part, I don't think BTC is going to be a good currency, it's expensive, slow, traceable, public.

My parents lost a lot in the 2000 crash, so were spared from the 2008 crash. Between those two I decided buying shares was a mugs game

(Nasdaq was 4000-5000 before crashing to 1300 back in 2000. It recovered to 2500 by 2008 before crashing back to 1500.

It's now 14,000 - massive gains in the last 10 years I've missed out on because of not trusting.

If you'd have bought $1k of Nasdaq and 1k of Bitcoin 5 years ago, you'd have $3k from nasdaq - an amazing return.

I can sort of see why the nasdaq is so high though. Crypto though?

That same $1k would mean you'd have $137k from bitcoin. If that's sustainable I don't know what unsustainable is.

DOGE? You'd be a millionaire.

But the political decisions of the economy seem to be built around driving these things up. It makes the UK house price boom of the 90s and 00s look tame - 500% in 25 years? A measly 6% roi?

25% per year gains on stocks, 170% per year on bitcoin? 300% per year on DOGE?

In 2018 people were saying about tulipmania with bitcoin and how the price would collapse. It did. $1k invested at the height of the bubble in 2017/18 when it reached $20k - 20 times what it was earlier in the year, was soon worth just $150.

It would now be worth $3k, 45% per year roi from investing at the worst possible time

Putting a measly $10 a month into bitcoin every month for the last 5 years would have cost $600 and left you with $14,620 today.

The market can remain retarded longer than I can remain solvent. The only thing I've learnt waiting for things to crash is that I'm an idiot, and people who fall for hype are rich.

Every single thing can lose its value. In addition:

Real estate can be bombed in a war or confiscated[0] and is not mobile for obvious reasons[1].

Gold can be stolen, confiscated - and it happened already more than once.

Companies can go bankrupt.

Items - either productive like machinery or various stores of value like art are not immune.

Cash/bank accounts - well, money printing will get you here.

Cryptocurrency - ridiculously volatile, many exciting dangers, can be stolen remotely with no recourse.

You are looking for an unicorn.

[0] For "real estate will never go down in value" fans: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Destroyed_Warsaw,_capital... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:German_Brennkommando-firi...

[1] Fun fact: Polish words for real estate is "nieruchomości", "nonmovables"

Same in NL, "onroerend goed" translates (literally) as "non-roaming goods".

You realise that these properties in the picture (Plac Defilad right in the centre of Warsaw) are worth a lot nowadays. And descendants of the original owners get compensated (the land had been confiscated after WW2 by communist government). So I would rather say that real estate could be illiquid with temporarily depressed prices occasionally.

https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plik:Panorama_ul._Emilii_Plate...

What about people who owned a flat? Have they got compensations restoring entire value? AFAIK no in general.

Or even a noticeable part of original value?

One of my friends recently got compensation (after 60 years old legal battle initiated by person who died before it completed). But that was for property that survived WWII and got confiscated after it.

> And descendants of the original owners get compensated

In other words value of original property went down (especially given opportunity cost).

And they were quite lucky, in similar cases many lost without recourse.

But overall I agree with the main point: real estate is one of best stores of value, some of it can survive even that.

But describing it as never, ever loosing value is not true - in many cases it lost part or all value, permanently, without compensation.

But there is another asset class beside real estate - arable land. People see gold as store of value which is false to some degree - gold was historically more of mean of exchange (of landed wealth) while the universal asset class paying regular dividends since Roman Empire until Industrial Revolution was arable land. And to a degree still is but since Industrial Revolution there are many alternative assets available that provide better/competitive returns (like government bonds)

Of course land could also be taken away but that happens very rarely (Communist revolutions in Russia, China, Central Europe). Historically land-owning class is stable. For example in largest wealth grabs in European history (Burgundians in France, Vandals in North Africa and best of all Norman conquest of Britain) there was generally sharing and mixing between old and new land-owners.

As a city dweller posting on internet I somehow missed arable land in a comment about good stores of capital. Go me!

Despite that my cousin owns large farm. Staying for so long in my family that it was located in 5 countries since my family moved into that specific location.

But still, it is not a magic pixie dust: your land can be confiscated, or taken by sea/river or polluted by industry/salt.

Or it may be turned into wetland/desert by some other external changes beyond your control.

Indeed. I believe that succinctly sums up the outcome of the investment for the actual person who did the investing.

For most people, the word temporary is not a good description for situations that persist until after you’re dead.

By bruteforcing into the wild? What are ypu referring to?

In some cases password (private key) as sole and sufficient method to have full control over asset, executable by anyone is a problem not a benefit.

You can't just login to paypal from another IP. You can't just login into most emails these days ( 2FA)

Crypto wallets have none of those protections.

Other than that:

EOS (dPoS) reversed transactions multiple times while being top 10 at the time: https://cointelegraph.com/news/eos-reverses-previously-confi...

Ethereum Classic was attacked multiple times with chain reversing double spends due to not enough energy being committed to immutability: https://www.coindesk.com/ethereum-classic-attacker-successfu...

Ethereum reversed the "DAO hack" with a hard fork.

Which is simply not true, there at least 100 Wallets just in the Android Store. You think none of them has some kind of additional protection?

But gold is not a currency either, so hmmm.

In all earnest, I wonder when the mainstream will realize that in a digital world the store of value and a currency can be different because they are easily interchangeable.

Just like bonds or gold for long term investment (store of value) and dollar (currency).

gold - the real thing - i guess you should have some, but this is more like insurance than asset, don't ever sell unless the world is ending stuff.