as a layman, I'm gonna buy all I can.
It ain’t gambling if you win
Sure anyone can lose money and it's a gamble, but it's an educated one, roulette is not
Option 1: I offer you 99,999/100,000 chance to lose everything you have, And a 1/100,000 chance to get 100,001 times more. Expected value is net positive. And yet, you’d be pretty dumb to do it. Gambling.
Option 2: I offer you 9/10 chance to get 1.01x more. 1/10 chance to get 0x. Expected loss. Better than 50% odds of gain. Gambling.
Option 3: Coin toss. Triple your lifespan on heads. Die on tails. Definitely gambling.
The point in option 1 and 3 is to illustrate that betting 10 times isn’t an option in many systems. You can’t say you should always do something because the risk reward is favorable. That’s still gambling, and sometimes a stupid decision.
The average outcome of a gamble is not the likely outcome of taking it. And even ignoring that, it’s still a gamble unless you can confidently run it at sufficient scale to hit the theoretical distribution.
> average annual return of 350%
That's misleading. The price is currently at the ~35-40% retrace from the high of 20k. What happened so far (for example the rally to 20k) is not an indicator that Bitcoin's value will grow or even be sustained.
I'm not saying Bitcoin doesn't have speculative value, but you have to be already an experienced analyst and trader (in case of day trading) to have a chance at profiting from it. "If it were easy everyone would be doing it" proverb is true. Crypto is much harder than forex for example. Again, unless you really know what you're doing, trading will hardly be more profitable than going to the casino.
If you buy and hold for multiple years, on average you will make 350% a year, very similarly to how you would see a certain level of average annual returns from buying and holding on the conventional stock market. The growth is being fueled by the adoption of a new technology.
When actively trading, profitably is calculated a bit differently, but I presume we're talking about a one off trade.
Bitcoin is well known and widely used at this point, even if it hasn’t reached its maximum audience it’s approaching that. Contrast the stock market who’s potential is capped by a combination of fossil fuels and the solar radiation flowing into the earth, which we’re no where near using efficiently, and you can see why they’re not at all in the same category.
Where you see governments 'stealing value', the rest of us see sensible monetary policy.
God save us from idiots who would hand said policy to a handful of software engineers and a self-interested mining cartel.
And the credit crisis was good because it flooded the market with cheap credit... That did what, exactly?
God saves us from the real idiots - those that think they have all the answers, instead of humbly accepting how little they know, about what they imagine they can design
(Those idiots are unfortunately those that seem to be good at the game of: "heads i win, tails others lose"
What adoption? Adoption appears to have stalled and fallen back, with multiple companies having announced that attempting to accept bitcoin had been a waste of time or even a net negative.
Speculating on a volatile asset, as an admitted layman, based on non-news is gambling, period.
>bitcoin still has an average annual return of 350%
Utterly irrelevant to all of the buyers in at $15,000+.