Comment by stouset
4 months ago
In 17 years, the value of my traditionally-invested assets (VTSAX) went up 700%.
I didn’t risk losing everything to scams. When I forgot my password my brokerage was able to restore my access. When I made a mistake in a transaction I was able to call them and sort it out.
Meanwhile, despite the incredible runup of BTC I know precisely zero Bitcoin billionaires. I know people who have theoretical fortunes on hard drives that have died. I know people who mistimed purchases and sales and who’ve perhaps turned a small profit. I know people who turned a large profit and then lost it all to malware or exchange failure.
So yeah, I do know what happened to the BTC holders.
You conveniently cherry-picked the low point after the 2008 crash as the starting point for your "went up" calculation. Had you started from the fund's inception in November 2000 and accounted for egg prices, the gain would be a more modest 39.4% over the 24.22-year period. Accounting for the price of gold, that would be a negative -14.7%.
And USD is in the much better shape than most other world fiat currencies, look at Zimbabwe, Argentina, Turkey or Russia.
The difference is that crypto hacks are rare, random and fixable (Bitcoin ETFs have the same brokerage protections), but fiat money hack is universal, systemic and legalized.