People buy Bitcoin expecting that holding onto it for a few years will vastly increase their purchasing power. "lambo", "to the moon", etc. People are starry ey

People buy Bitcoin expecting that holding onto it for a few years will vastly increase their purchasing power. "lambo", "to the moon", etc. People are starry eyed over the 1000x return they could have made if they bought years earlier, and are hoping there's still some of that juice left to squeeze. Maybe not 1000x but 100x or 50x or 10x. Just search "bitcoin price target" and browse the dreams and napkin calculations of "assuming Bitcoin's market cap grows to match all gold" or "all M2" or "the euro" or whatever your favorite goal is, "...then 1 BTC == 1 zillion dollars and I can retire". 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.