Concerned about my friend who’s a Bitcoin maxi (lemmy.dbzer0.com)

submitted 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) by aldalire@lemmy.dbzer0.com to c/monero@monero.town

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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

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

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[-] jet@hackertalks.com 8 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

He is your friend, you did your best to tell him. Now just accept him, and let him ride. Be there to console him when things go bad, or to celebrate when things go well.

[-] aldalire@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 4 months ago

Good answer :-) thank you. Maybe i’ve been lowkey trying to make him see the error in his beliefs while bitcoin is still at a peak. But in the end it’s his decision and his money.

Although I’m kinda concerned about his mental health, he’s been going down deeeep conservative rabbit holes in twitter (has been espousing some islamaphobic beliefs recently) and i know him personally during college and he’s wasn’t bigoted, he’s a mainly chill, intelligent dude.

[-] jet@hackertalks.com 4 points 4 months ago

Keeping people out of rabbit hole is hard. Try to get them to socialize with you and a more moderate group of people in real life. Try to get more human voices in his life so the crazy online voices have less weight.

[-] I_Has_A_Hat@lemmy.world 4 points 4 months ago

Out of curiosity, why do you think this peak is different than the last several?

[-] aldalire@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

The “bitcoin prophets” are loud and convincing at face value. Loud and influential voices like and Saifadean Ammous are chiming in, and the sheeple follow the money and fear missing out the gravy train. The beliefs are self perpetuating but the train don’t got an engine in my opinion.

I was raised very religious but shed my beliefs later in life, and I really do get hella religion vibes. The BTC community has core “tenets”, decentralization, “store of value”, that a second layer will come save their souls soon. It’s a very interesting sociological experiment in my opinion, and it’s unfair to call it a ponzi scheme because this is something different entirely.

They took bitcoin, bastardized it by keeping the 1MB blocksize (originally implemented in the protocol to prevent DDOS attacks early on) so it can’t scale, and rode its dead body with Saylor at the helm. I’m interested in how things will play out.