I’m posting this on the Monero sub because ya’ll are chill, the BTC community are occasionally peppered with nuts

My friend who’s a Bitcoin maxi has took all his savings and put it in bitcoin, i believe 10k USD more or less. He’s very (almost religiously) certain that bitcoin will skyrocket. I talk, debate and question his beliefs for weeks now, trying to take a nonjudgmental stance (although sometimes i falter), and there are three pieces of “evidence” that he believes Bitcoin will eventually 100k or even 1M

  1. The bitcoin standard by Saifadean Ammous, a watered down textbook on Austrian economics that I’ve been reading recently actually.

  2. The “Power Law”, basically a regression analysis on Bitcoin’s historic price and adoption, mainly esposed by this dude https://x.com/Giovann35084111 (here’s a youtube vid https://invidious.fdn.fr/watch?v=NxAkZ2tHQko)

  3. The “Energy Hypothesis” of bitcoin, he thinks that bitcoin will allow society to capture excess energy generation and make it profitable through mining bitcoin

I’ve reviewed these and think it’s flimsy at best. It is under my belief that a store of value can only be feasible when either it is a medium of exchange or if it is backed by something (like fiat paper money, for example) that allows it to be an efficient medium of exchange, none of which applied to bitcoin right now.

I even try to suggest him books like Roger Ver’s Hijacking Bitcoin (that I converted from epub to pdf just for him) and he wouldn’t read it because “Ver’s a scammer and got fooled by BCH”. Although I really just think it’s heavy confirmation bias, Ver is indisputably a knowledgeable source for bitcoin (he was an early adopter, he’s “Bitcoin Jesus” for god’s sake, and has a lot of knowledge of the economics behind bitcoin given that he’s a businessman who’s built his businesses on top of bitcoin). Hijacking Bitcoin is an excellent book btw go check out the pdf I posted it a while ago on this sub

I’m just looking for advice on how to proceed. It was fun debating and dunking on him but at this point i’m just worried that the bitcoin bubble will burst and he’d lose his savings.

It’s one of those occasions where I kinda don’t want to be right in the debate

  • HelixDab2@lemm.ee
    1·
    6 months ago

    The “Energy Hypothesis” of bitcoin, he thinks that bitcoin will allow society to capture excess energy generation and make it profitable through mining bitcoin

    That’s… Not really what’s happening. At all. Bitcoin mining isn’t using excess energy, it’s forcing energy producers to generate more energy, and forcing rates higher. If everyone was using solar or wind generation, and there was truly excess power being generated that had no additional costs associated with it–because it was a cloudless day with stiff breezes–then sure; the excess power couldn’t be stored past a certain point, so the solar cells and turbines would just be taken off line. But that’s not the way most generation works; when there’s low demand, power plants burn less coal/natural gas/oil to turn the generator turbines, and they ramp that up when there’s high demand.