[icedchai]

What you say is true only in the most basic sense. If you look at the movement of some stocks, there is clearly a ton of speculation. There are whole stocks (and classes of stocks, like some recent SPACs) that essentially move on almost nothing but speculation. Regardless, he said he liked to "earn his money with effort", so I am interested in learning how far that goes...

[pavlov]

Purely speculative stocks are traditionally called penny stocks, and brokers go out of their way to advice you against investing in them.

The same caveats should apply to Bitcoin.

[icedchai]

My point is that it is not black-and-white. Stocks represent companies with real products and cash flows, but there is also a ton of speculative, bubble like behaviour on top of it. Take a look at a 1 year chart of something like TSLA or NIO and tell me that isn't true.

[pavlov]

Buying a share of Tesla gives you equity in the efforts of thousands of smart people, accumulated intellectual property, factories, sales and marketing organizations etc. The shareholder probably expects the generated cash flow to be channeled by Tesla into creating something new, thus expanding the scope of what a share of TSLA represents. Those expectations may be unrealistic, but there is actual growth and invention underlying the speculation.

Bitcoin doesn’t represent any such creative endeavor. It’s the very opposite: an artificial scarcity mindgame that burns fossil fuels to power useless random number generators. It’s a tragedy that intelligent people who could be doing something creative instead spend their energy on greedy speculation around such a dark project.

[icedchai]

Bitcoin represents some creative endeavor. Is it over exaggerated? Yes... but you can't say there's nothing there.

I got in early and got lucky. I mined a bunch of bitcoins about 10 years ago and have been selling them off gradually. I take that cash and buy stocks with it.