Well, I mean (a) it is unwise to accumulate a big pile of paper money (or the equivalent in a bank), like a common Disney duck plutocrat; if you do this, you will in the long run lose money in real terms. By design. Money (or at least modern money; things were somewhat different in persistently-deflationary pre-industrial economies) is not designed for investment. Money should not be the comparison; it’s a tool, not an investment vehicle.

But (b) money is given some real grounding by states; you can pay tax with it, in particular. It’s not much, and it’s not bulletproof, but by comparison to cryptocurrency, well, it’s _something_.

But really, it makes no sense as an argument that hoarding cryptocurrency is a good idea, because hoarding _money_ is, notoriously, a _bad_ idea.

John Reed Stark, former Chief of Internet Enforcement of SEC on 60 minutes:

Crypto is a scourge, it is not something you want in your society. It has no utility. It is pure speculation. There is no balance sheet to crypto, there is no financial statements. There is no audit inspection, examination, net capital requirements, no licensure of individuals involved, and there is no transparency into it. That creates real systemic risks, not just risks for investors.

But the other part people don't talk about enough is the dire externalities that are enabled by crypto. Every single crime you can think of, is easier to do now because of crypto. Especially ransomware, human sex trafficking, sanctions evasion, money laundering. North Korea is financing their nuclear program using crypto.

---

Meanwhile, crypto investors, companies and executives accounted for almost half of corporate donations in the 2024 election cycle, with some contributing tens of millions of dollars to help Trump win a second term in office. See https://www.cnbc.com/2025/01/23/trump-signs-executive-order-...

Why is this the case? I mean buying crypto via a ?local? exchange is possible, but it is not possible to buy a more stable currency. How is the crypto bought, does someone sell it in that local currency? Because if not, you still need zo transfer your currency to (in >90% of cases) USD and then buy crypto. So why not just use those (the same way everybody else does).

> first rule of investment is to diversify

That does not mean buy anything. Intentionality matters. Diversification is a risk mitigation strategy, but holding bitcoin increases a portfolio’s risk. So if you want to diversify to reduce risk, purchasing bitcoin is the exact opposite of what you want to do.

I don’t really see how/why/etc Bitcoin would achieve that use case. If governments and financial institutions aren’t bag holders then they are extremely financially motivated to stop that from occurring, and afaik those groups aren’t holding huge Bitcoin reserves (maybe fidelity is, or at least was).

As the article points out, bitcoin is so volatile that having it as even 5% of your portfolio will "drastically raise its risk profile".

None. Its a scarce resource that has been mutually agreed upon to be desirable. Much like gold or diamonds. Sure they have some limited use in non jewelry applications but nothing that justifies their prices vs the existing supply besides people just agreeing they are valuable.

As a store of value though vs gold it has more positives. Much easier to transport a billion dollars worth of btc than gold.

Much easier to self custody.

Truly limited supply, they pull more gold out of the ground every day.

The world literally just got together and decided BTC is what they want and the price reflects that. Its a fascinating case study just in that regard.

The video is here: Page is terrible, video is about 1/3 down

https://finance.yahoo.com/video/buying-bitcoin-buying-nyc-ap...

Is there a modern day version of what Bell Labs was at its peak?