I never understood the argument against speculation. Many stocks are losing money or do not yet have a working product, so how is speculating on these kinds of stocks any different from speculating on cryptocurrencies?
Stocks are ownership of a tiny part of a company that has assets, cash flow, and does something in the world. Stocks are a speculation as well, some more than others, but the balance of speculation to investment is weighted differently.
Bitcoin on the other hand is almost always only purchased for speculation that the exchange rate will go in your favor. You don't own a tiny part of anything.
From my perspective, a big issue with Bitcoin speculation is that it's inherently zero-sum. Investing in a company is usually positive-sum (even if it you don't profit).
Both Ethereum and Solana are currently coded to do this, though AFAIK neither of them are currently cash-positive due to their burned fees not being enough to offset issuance yet.
Bitcoin got labeled just a "store of value", but with Bitcoin Lightning it can be used for low fee payments too.
Pity about mining though, I wish they followed Ethereum into staking. It doesn't matter how much value you provide if you burn the planet along the way.
“Losing money” is a bit different; if a company is, deliberately, investing in growth rather than generating a net profit, that _can_ be a _good_ thing, as it implies greater future profits. Amazon, say, _could_ have become profitable far earlier than it did, but it would be a much smaller company if it had. If they’re buying something for $20 and selling it for $10, then yeah, not so much, but again that’s in the class of companies that you should not invest in, that most people do not invest in (they’re not in the major indexes), and that arguably should never have been allowed to float.
When people talk about investing in the markets, they’re usually talking about either investing in an index, or in some approximation of an index (whether through active management or cobbling together their own portfolio of real companies which will generally more or less mirror the top 10 of at least one major index). They’re not talking about buying shares in weird scam companies; _that_ is speculation.
Even if BTC was determined to have value, wouldn't the risk of tether be enough to avoid it (if - aside from giving BTC value - speaking from verified facts only. Meaning it's an established FACT that the people who control tether have not proven it is or was ever backed by an equal amount of capital).