What's a USD investment?
People want USD because of it's transactional value (i.e. they want to trade with it), not to use it as a store of value
And you get a massive return for investing in dollars, if your own currency has say hyper-inflation.
"I exchange my local currency for a USD and in a year when I want to buy something I can exchange it back for twice as much local of currency"
Not massively different to investing in BTC today, in the hope that you can convert it back for more of your local currency when you want to spend it.
People overseas want dollars because dollars are extremely easy to transact with and many companies [especially outside their country] accept only dollars, not because a price graph and a tweet from Elon Musk have convinced them that dollars will be even more popular next year. The actual mechanism that ensures many of these companies will continue to accept dollars next year is financial obligation, not hype.
Maybe if you live in a place where liquid assets are hard to come by I could see using USD instead
Of course not to the same extent as in crypto currencies, but still.
Bitcoin is not backed by anything. Thus it has wild swings.
About that...
https://www.currentmarketvaluation.com/models/buffett-indica...
For investors to get that growth they desire, they need exponentially more new money to come into the system. If I buy 1 BTC at $40k, to double my money I need to sell it at $80k.
Maybe I sell it to one rich guy, maybe to two people on my level each buying 0.5 BTC at $40k, or maybe to 1000 poor people each buying .001 BTC at $80. But somehow $80k needs to come into Bitcoin.
Eventually you run out of people in the world with more money to buy in. And since the Bitcoins themselves aren't useful, the person who bought the top is SOL. The whole utility was "get more money out than you put in" and there's no bigger buyer left to make that possible, so now what is it good for? That's why people compare it to a pyramid scheme because pyramid schemes have an identical problem, with everybody making money until there simply aren't any more rubes left to buy in.
The dollar, even though it's still just scraps of paper and shared make-believe, doesn't have this scaling problem. People aren't holding onto their dollars expecting them to double in value. It's a currency, i.e. a handy abstraction layer over bartering, not an investment. I use the dollar because it beats trading my software development labor for chicken eggs from my boss's side-gig farm and then trading those for apples and gasoline and mortgage payments and electricity. I don't expect to get more out than I put in.
Stable currencies make sense and work. Double-your-money schemes run out of steam. It's that simple.
-- edit --
I will give Bitcoin credit though for being the first decentralized pyramid. It doesn't die, so if you miss the peak in one cycle, you can always hope that a few years later it'll come back in style and reel in a bigger crowd before collapsing again.
One is backed by aircraft carriers and the force of law, the other is backed by math and an egregious amount of energy usage.
Don’t see how it precludes the ‘having value’ part of things.