Honest question, how come? You can maybe argue something bout inflation, but it's not a very strong argument since a. the effects of extreme monetary easing aren't fully understood and b. there are countries which have been printing money with limited inflation.
Long explanation:
If you build a country around a sufficiently deflationary currency then it will stagnate over the long term because keeping your money yields better returns than investing or running businesses.
Let's say you run a company that buys $800 worth of ingredients to make a product that sells for $1000. The problem with physical reality is that you first have to buy before you can sell and the sell date may lie very far into the future. So what happens is that you will do the regrettable act of spending money first and once your product has hit the shelves of a retail store you have to sell your products for $900. Let's say you are a lone carpenter for ease of argument and you are running the entire business yourself. Those $100 are your income. Incomes of workers are going down over time.
In short what you are doing is sell low and buy high all the time because of physical reality.
This can get really nasty, to the point that if you have product stock that isn't selling at all you can actually make a loss! Lets say you have a table that only sold after 3 years for $700. It clearly wasn't worth it so why do it again? Even if you wanted, at some point your business will go bankrupt if you keep doing losing strategies.
Why is this a problem? If you were using Bitcoin to save for retirement then there will eventually come a tipping point where your Bitcoin are worthless because you cannot exchange them for services or goods anymore because the real economy is gone or not big enough to support your retirement.
In practice though we have things like net90 payment terms.
But purely financially, they are a terrible bet.
> a bad bet if you have no better alternative.
there's always a better alternative. For example, putting the money in a bank account with interest. Or placing it into an index fund.
Admittedly we’re deep into edge cases here. The only one I can think of is that you have $1,000 today, and need $100,000 by tomorrow. Maybe someone is holding your cat to ransom, and you really love that cat. No one is going to loan you a hundred grand to give to catnappers, so you go to the casino hoping for some really good luck as you put everything on black. Good luck, Mittens.
The upshot of which is that even bets with negative expected value can have positive expected utility depending on where you are on the curve.
Speculating on the markets is not gambling in the same way as in a casino - there's some element of skill in speculating in the markets, and there's not house-odds on the markets. I would compare speculating on the markets to be similar to a game of poker (which is not a house-odds game).
I believe that for a while some video poker games like jacks or better had bugs in their pay table that meant with perfect strategy you could make a positive return in the long run, but I'd be very surprised if this is still the case