[jasode]

>Ray Dalio at no point in his life ever believed he should be keeping his wealth in "cash".

I'm not saying that. His recent "cash is trash" was talking about staying away from investments like US government bonds because of negative yields and money printing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tZyWVxGXPHo&t=24s

(Because in the past, reasonable people did believe that buying and holding US Treasuries was a semi-decent way of investing. To be clear, we're not talking about just leaving pure cash in a $250k FDIC-insure bank savings account.)

>the US has at various points been able to issue them with negative interest rates - taking a loss has been less of a loss then just holding currency and no better options existed.

And this is the part I was responding to in your first comment. It's not just speculators. Another narrative for crypto's rising price is that some investors believe a better option now exists for preserving purchasing power. This is the defensive financial perspective that can simultaneously exist with other market participants who are only in bitcoin for the casino gambling speculation.

Yes, some people buy real estate and just leave the houses empty for "speculation". But some others also buy houses to live in them and many buyers bid up prices with competing offers because of desirable location closer to the office. If there can be 2 or more different narratives for rising real estate prices, why can't there be multiple narratives to explain crypto?

[XorNot]

I'm not dismissing the idea that "some" investors believe that, I'm dismissing the idea that they're a big enough group to matter in anyway. Or that they're likely to believe it for very long over looking at how much USD they think they'll cash out for. And if they were looking for a stable store of value, an asset under enormous speculation is a terrible choice.

The real estate comparison is also irrelevant: unlike any other asset, cryptocurrency doesn't do anything useful.