Despite that interference, from everything I’ve read though it’s hard to describe the bitcoin experiment as anything else than a massive failure…
I wish I could have a $333m failure like that.
(edit - see also his approval rating - 91% https://x.com/stats_feed/status/1875573928250179666)
Although of course it is unknowable how much of that money was bribe and how much El Salvador would have gotten without additional leverage.
I think you need to refresh your understanding of the difference between a loan and a gift; it wasn't an incentive to change the behavior, it was a loan to deal with the problems caused by the behavior.
1) A country is doing something the US doesn't like.
2) The country is in some trouble of their own making.
3) The IMF will come and bail them out if they would be inclined to start doing the things the US likes instead of the things it doesn't like.
Basically, the IMF money is the carrot you get for bending the knee. The stick can be the CIA or other things.
Try starting an independent one if you think otherwise.
El Salvador's cryptocurrency was helping other people (not sure if actual citizens), so it had to go.
No, they aren't.
> The charitable interpretation of how they operate looks like this:
You misspelled “conspiratorial”, and it's not even the most reasonable conspiracy theory.
I think you need to take a pause and read what you wrote because there's some serious cognitive dissonance in your claims.
The IMF is a fund put together and ran by the majority of countries in the world as a lender of last resort. It serves as the world's insurance policy on stability. So when a country like El Salvador knocks on their doors, it's a kin to stating the world they are in trouble and they desperately need a hand. The IMF then provides help, but requires as a tradeoff that the country cleans up their act and actually corrects it's course as to mitigate or eliminate the root causes of their instability. For example, countries that are hugely indebted have to comply with demands to lower their sovereign debt down to manageable levels.
Looking at El Salvador, their populist and ill-advised policy to adopt Bitcoin as a currency was a fantastic failure with a tradeoff of being a huge risk factor. Even the most firebrand crypto bro is forced to acknowledge that crypto currencies like Bitcoin have a number of traits that renders them unusable as money, among which the most popular one is the core reason driving it's popularity: volatility. It's to no surprise that one of the basic requirements for stability is to not use a highly volatile and uncontrollable asset as the nation's currency.
The mental disturbance angle is also compounded by the far-fetched conspiracy theories on how El Salvador ditched Bitcoin because "the man" wants to kill it.
This is essentially the other way around. It's volatile if it's predominantly used for speculation rather than as a currency, because "widespread use as a currency" is a big value sink that absorbs volatility. In other words, if more or larger countries used it as a currency it would be less volatile.
It's predominantly used for speculation. Back in the real world, it's the only purpose it has. There is no way around it.
There is also a pretty obvious way to avoid the volatility in the interim when using it as a currency: Don't use it to specify prices and don't hoard large quantities of it. If you have a Bitcoin wallet with the equivalent of $100 in it, it doesn't matter that much if it goes down to $50 and then up to $150 and then back to $100 again over the course of a year, because +/- $50/year is not a big deal. Meanwhile we have computers now, so prices can be listed in US dollars or any other currency and then use the live exchange rate when paying in cryptocurrency, while still accepting it widely.
And "it has no other purpose" is a weird claim. It has an obvious purpose: It allows you to exchange value without permission or identity. The "it's a public ledger so there's no privacy" claim is silly; your wallet address is public but you can have arbitrarily many of them, there is nothing inherently tying them to your identity, and there are known implementations (e.g. Monero) that provide even stronger privacy. These are things the existing banking system doesn't provide, and from the perspective of countries that actually respect the privacy of their citizens (or any citizens who want their privacy protected), are features.
Or because Bircoin more than doubled in Price since El Salvador started buying?
El Salvador will not sell its bitcoins and keep on adding them, maybe now as strategic reserve.
Meanwhile Tether is moving to El Salvador.
Because it was a failure in each and every single thing it was claimed it would achieve, specially the fact that everyone in El Salvador ditched the system once they cached out their sign on bonus.
You are both incorrect in different ways. Bitcoin as legal tender in El Salvador was not a well-adopted initiative and thus they were okay with axing it. The loan was not to deal with the problems of their behavior, but to push more important things in El Salvador's agenda.
I think you need to check up with reality because your scenario has nothing to do with the one reported in the article. If you read the report, you'll understand thay El Salvador reached out to the IMF, a lender of last resort, asking for funding to finance their reform agenda. Among the long list of requirements designed to improve financial health, Bitcoin ceases to be an official currency.
3000 years from now what would be the store of value would be the question to ask.
Next I transfer it to kraken, convert it to Monero and deposit it on my drug market of choice.
It used to be simpler but this is how I do it nowadays.
Your marriage is a speculative asset that your wife doesn't cheat on you in future and actually loves you.
S&P is a speculative asset that it will perform like it has been performing in last 30 years.
USD is a speculative asset on US not going bankrupt.
Your career is speculative asset that you don't get fired tomorrow and you can find another job if you do get fired.
Bitcoin is a speculative asset that a decentralized cryptocurrency is better than relying on coins issued by bankruptable nations.
You are a speculative asset of your ego.
So I think I’m missing something. I feel like you’re suggesting that we should be more comfortable speculating because we do it all the time, but I’m not seeing how those are all the same.
You don't know what will happen in any of the cases. You just choose to believe one more over the other based on what has happened in the past.
I suppose where I get lost is that, at least subjectively, I end up treating different anticipated return distributions differently. I want a mixture of risks, both in terms of their covariance and the absolute properties.
When I think of "speculation", I am intentionally shaping only a small portion of my personal portfolio toward high risk, high reward activities. And I only really feel comfortable doing that because a larger fraction of my personal risk is in safer vehicles.
Atop that, I also think a lot about liquidity time bounds. I want access to a reasonable amount of highly-liquid, low-risk investments. I need that flexibility to be safe in the event that I need to buy something.
To my eye at least, I qualitatively differentiate between speculative investments and these liquid/low risk ones. If I felt I only had one kind of risk, I would seek out the other in some proportion.
Spouses are not very fungible though, not that I've ever tried ! ...
Because you wouldn't do either?
BTC has shown itself magically profitable indeed, but its value could only be kept by the ability of holders to keep the asset. Most marriages and some jobs will endure even in the toughest times.
I’m guessing that you had a divorce /and/ that I know the reason why she left you
Bitcoin has only failed so far as a replacement for Visa and Mastercard. So no, nobody's using it to buy coffee.
+ By allowing 8x larger blocks (unless it's even larger now?), if in widespread use with full blocks, the blockchain would be 8x larger. Bitcoin's blockchain is already the better part of 1TB, though you can still fit that on a cheap SSD. Imagine if it were 8 and growing fast.
+ Because BCH uses the same hash algo as Bitcoin, but is much less popular, it's at risk of 51% attack.
+ Because there is no pressure on block sizes, fees are very low, which means that as halvings continue the block rewards for BCH will get extremely small. This will result in hashrate continuing to decrease, putting it at even greater risk of 51% attacks. Bitcoin's high fees allow it to remain profitable for miners even without inflation. Miners have to be paid to keep the network secure, and that's either going to come from tx fees or from inflation. BCH aims to have neither and that puts it at risk.
And anyway, there are much better solutions for day to day payments, such as Monero and Ethereum.
This has always felt like a completely weaksauce argument to me. Even with Bitcoin, very few people other than dedicated miners download a full blockchain (like it or not). 1TB is already too large to keep on your phone or laptop, but 8TB is at most a minor inconvenience on a server or dedicated mining rig. What's the demographic where a measly factor of 8 makes a difference?
I'm gonna have to ask for evidence on this one, I strongly believe most full nodes are not mining pools. http://bitdash.io/ says there are ~10,000 running full nodes, yet there are only ~100 mining pools that have produced a block in recent history: https://miningpoolstats.stream/bitcoin
> 1TB is already too large to keep on your phone or laptop
On your phone, sure. But my desktop already has a few TB of storage. But not 8. And Bitcoin Cash supporters usually seem to indicate that they'd increase it beyond 8 if the 8mb blocks filled up.
The only ones who need to have full blockchain nodes are the miners, and for them it’s just another disk in their data center.
It not being "used" in this context is referring to it not being used as legal tender. The law that was walked back was one which had made bitcoin legal tender throughout the country. As others have mentioned, it seems to have largely failed in being adopted as such, as surveys seem to indicate that less than 10% of people in the country had used it as legal tender in the previous year.
If the fees were lower I'd use it for plenty of other things too.
Aye, there's the rub.
With all due respect, why not Bitcoin Cash or some other coin? Bitcoin Cash is the exact same thing as Bitcoin - same protocol, same 21 million coin limit, same Satoshi whitepaper, same everything, except bigger blocks and thus, much lower fees. If you are using a coin as an actual currency, and not as a speculator, why stick with high-fee Bitcoin?
I used to believe in Bitcoin in the beginning, but the high fees make it impractical to use as everyday currency.
Bitcoin Cash is much closer to what I had hoped Bitcoin would become. It’s the same as Bitcoin, except that it ideologically split exactly for the reason that some people wanted it to behave more like an actual currency, while others invented the “digital gold” narrative.
Food, medicine, transportation, education, and everything else at or near the bottom of Maslow's pyramid of needs still cannot be directly purchased with bitcoin.
The other punchline to the Bitcoin joke is that it's finite. In 120 years it will begin to evaporate from existence as more and more wallets are simply lost to time.
This is how insane that sounds
Debased currency - a problem every large state eventually faced - is a consequence of deflation.
Inflation in the monetary supply, not deflation, leads to the debasement of a currency. An example is how the influx of gold from the conquistadors into 16th century Spain led to inflation, due to the increased supply of this means of exchange resulting in the debasement in value of a given unit of this means of exchange.
Edit: I'd remembered wrong. It was silver, not gold, that Spain experienced an influx of.
No, that's not debasement - in fact it was the opposite, the huge supply of silver (not so much gold) meant those Spanish coins were good-quality bullion. Inflation happened, and while that can commonly be caused by debasement, that wasn't the cause in this instance.
The gold escudo was 22-karat for basically it's entire existence,.
https://acoup.blog/2025/01/03/collections-coinage-and-the-ty...
Otherwise it's just fiat all over again
(Or a hardfork, if your changes have to apply to all transactions, though this would be extremely tricky.)
It's just a question about updating the source code.
The fundamental appeal of bitcoin is the lack of ability to change the protocol without buy-in from a sufficient fraction of the community.
I also think there will be a gold rush of hacking old wallets one day when the encryption is broken. Not sure if that will happen before or after btc failure though. You can’t upgrade security on lost wallets.
> Countries do redenominations all the time
That’s not really the same, in several fundamental ways.
It’s hard to imagine a financial instrument that’s less suited to be used as an actual currency than bitcoin. Even going back to the gold standard would be a better idea.
The rest left me puzzled, can you elaborate? Why should the money holder do anything productive? Why getting richer and richer becomes something bad when we go crypto?
This question works better the other way round. Why should people that do all the work and take all the investment risks to make the riches get continually decreasing returns on their efforts whilst the people that sit and HODL get continually increasing returns on doing nothing?
Is that sarcasm? It discourages any type of economic activity.
Why would someone invest into or try to start a business when you can become richer by just sitting on your money pile with no risk.
Artificially constricting the supply of money in a non static economy is a bad idea. Like the gold standard just much worse.
One thing i’ve always wondered: If something like Bitcoin was the only currency, then it would be like a direct mapping of 21 Million Bitcoin <-> all global economic activity and goods and services. In that case, shouldn’t its price be relatively stable, and might actually even go down sometimes? Like in big natural disasters increasing the cost of certain goods?
I’m not a crypto zealot, but I’m not a big believer in the idea that the economy needs to be stimulated and I need to be forced to spend my money before it loses its value. I just want to buy what I need or really want.
And in the hypothetical case of having a mapping of “all economic activity” <-> “21M payment units”, then the relative stability of this money might still make investments more lucrative than just hoping for my money to be worth slightly more tomorrow. In this hypothetical scenario it would be more like “my money is worth 1000 eggs today, next month it might be 1001 (if others grow the economy) or 999 (if something unforeseen happens halfway across the globe). So if an investment looks like it might yield the value of 1100 eggs there would still be people to take the risk of investing, no?
It might. It would be significantly less likely. Basic economics. Unless you don’t think that most people are at least marginally rational..
> In that case, shouldn’t its price be relatively stable, and might actually even go down sometimes
That’s true only if there is no economic growth. Gold standard had a similar problem.
Why would someone invest into or try to start a business when you can become richer by just sitting on your _property_ pile with no risk.
Yeah, I guess.
Well that implies that you are more or less economically illiterate. I’m not talking about property and even renting residential/commercial property (as relatively safe as it is) does provide an actual service.
Anyway.. a very basic example, imagine you have $1000000, you can:
- keep it under your bed and lose 2% every year
- invest it into real estate etc. and make e.g. 4% every year.
- invest into the stock market and make 6%.
Now with a deflationary currency like bitcoin (or gold back in the mid to late 1800s) you can just hoard it and conservatively make 2-3% every year* invest into safe bonds and gain another 3-4%. Business would need to grow at an extremely fast pace to be able to attract much capital in such an environment.
* of course it’s only hypothetical. You’d need the economy to grow and productivity to increase YoY for this. That would be unlikely in any economy that used Bitcoin as its primary currency.
Bitcoin experiences less inflation than regular currencies. Some coins get created now, but over time we know its character will become deflationary: no new coins will be created, and some will be lost at times due to poor wallet management.
As a result, people will chose to spend other currency in preference to spending bitcoin. This is self-reinforcing. The infrastructure will not be in place to use it on the odd occasion that someone wanted to.
You could create a blockchain currency which had a natural and continuous rate of inflation, to encourage people to spend it. You could bootstrap this by mutualising it across an industry. e.g. imagine if the largest datacentre groups got together to create ModestlyInflationaryCoin, and then said they would offer discounts to customers who paid in ModestlyInflationaryCoin, as a means of bootstrapping it. Other groups might start to use it, and it would stay in circulation because people would want to be rid of it once they had it.
Even if such a currency existed, it would probably be short-lived. /Once it was bootstrapped/, its stakeholders would have strong incentive to change its contract to be non-inflationary. Making that change would convert their holdings from Bad Money to Good Money, and as a result the character it would significantly increase its value.
But the datacentre groups could then mutualise a new currency in place of the old one. It is possible that there is a virtuous loop here, and that there will be a race to quality in currencies in our future, grown from how easy it is to create new currencies. We might start to see the identity of currencies a bit more like the way we see futures contracts in our current era.
The elected government serves the society of its citizens, while inventors and holders of unofficial currencies are individuals who ultimately serve only themselves.
It is worth emphasising here: non-inflationary currency does not grow its value, so it would be unusual for people to want to put their wealth exclusively into store-of-value. Rather, most people will want a mix of inflationary-currency, store-of-value, and investment in growth-generating businesses.
When people talk about wanting to use bitcoin as a day-to-day currency, I feel like they are missing the best benefit if could offer us.
We already have effective day-to-day currencies. But we have not had a reliable store of value. The US, UK and Australia each have a history of denying ownership of gold when it suits them, which is when people need it most.
The lack of reliable store-of-wealth has made it too-easy for governments to fleece wealth-generating people in order to buy votes. This is not the long-term strategic path, but it creates a race-to-the-bottom due to short-term incentives. Perhaps blockchain will change that, by allowing the creation of an easily accessed utility that sits beyond the easy influence of the nation state.
To be effective it does not need to be perfect, just better than the options we have now. It has been encouraging to me to see the CCP struggling with blockchain, and then outlawing it because they cannot control it.
As a general rule it's not very convenient to do so though since the value can fluctuate. (Which naturally all currencies do, but it would be kind of like paying with USD in the EU. You could do that, but most stores are not interested in the extra hassle of keeping track of multiple currencies.)
It is also not uncommon for services like VPN or IPTV streaming ("pirate streaming") providers to accept crypto.
A counter-example: can you come up to a coffee shop with a gold collectible coin, chew a piece out, and use it to pay for your coffee directly? You need a proxy in form of a pawn shop for that.
Instruments are instruments, if it is not used for every day business transactions doesn't mean it is not heavily ab-used inside it's niche
So why is the IMF so against bitcoins that they'd rather pay to eliminate it? Or are the IMF scared that bitcoin can actually succeed, in a way which prevents IMF members from asserting monetary pressure in ways that benefits them?
Cryptocurrency bros are literally speedrunning the entirety of monetary system failures. All of them. You’d think, maybe after the first couple they’d read a book or something?
Heck no! YOLO!
I wouldn’t say nobody (fools exist), but, sure, only a fool would deny the statement “gold cannot form a good monetary system”.
But... Isn't that the opposite of your Bitcoin claim?
It says a lot about the popularity of Bitcoin, no?
The government were giving out btc
The government literally give (almost) everybody $30 in btc to promote this, 8% is too low
[0]: but also too quickly, hence all the breaches and 8-figure heists
The dollar down vs itself by 20ish percent.
The median home price is up 30ish percent.
Oil is up 45ish percent.
Gold and the SP500 are each up 80ish percent.
Bitcoin is up 1000ish percent.
If you snooze through the day-by-day, season-by-season noise, the volatility of Bitcoin is a fun and relaxing rocket to ride. You just have to ignore all discussion focused on time frames of less than four years.
All in all, billionaires are a bad example of holding legal tender, because that just doesn't happen.
royal family kingdom of saudi arabia
Lots of billionaires manage their portfolios conservatively. Your equating currency with liquid assets is unnecessary and tanks your argument. Almost nobody holds billions of dollars in legal tender other than those who have to, e.g. sanctioned countries and criminals.
This way, they get to control unlimited assets without paying any tax.
Personally, I don't think that's so great "for the economy", because I actually don't care about the economy...
I care about people, and having 500 billionaires owning everything and charging everyone to use it is not the economy I want for people.
I'd rather that everyone pays tax, especially the super-rich.
That "other people's wealth" you're talking about is everyone's wealth.
Billionaires stole the profits of our work from us, and they didn't do it fairly.
I feel you underestimate how much a billion dollars is.
https://mkorostoff.github.io/1-pixel-wealth/
Nobody in history has ever worked hard enough to earn a billion dollars fairly.
It's crazy to me that you'd defend these people who have corrupted and degraded the entire system - the government, the finance sector, the media - to only favor holding everyone else to ransom. Not producing but holding. Societal wealth stolen without paying tax to benefit society. People didn't choose this.
I'm not starving, sure. And I'd be absolutely fine paying significantly more tax than I am now.
But I'm not about to voluntarily donate while I am still forced to work towards retirement, and there are people controlling literally 10,000 times more assets than I am that pay zero tax.
Do you not see the inevitable outcome of that?
You and your children, and their children, will own nothing because the super-rich will outbid you and everyone else for everything.
Food, houses, cars, travel, hotels, healthcare, medicine. EVERYTHING.
You will be poor. The rich is a tiny club and you're not in it.
Everyone, even the wealthy ones here on hn will eventually succumb. You will be outbid for everything.
You will have to sell your house to afford necessities while all your work goes towards luxuries for oligarchs.
There must be some mechanism to limit wealth or that is the inevitable outcome.
Here's a little thought experiment...
It's a hot day and everyone's thirsty. You have $9. There's a bottle of water on the table that you want to buy and the price on it is $10.
I give you $1. You can almost feel your thirst satiated.
Then I give the person next to you $1,000. How do you feel now?
Well our current system is like that, but multiplied by 100.
I do not agree that society should exist solely for the benefit of a handful of super-rich freeloaders.
On the desert island, they would starve and/or be eaten. That's not my definition of a useful member of society.
This seems like a very skewed perspective. You work for a salary, I imagine, and you freely agreed to take that job and in return get a salary, even if the company was losing money or its share price was plummeting. I.e. taking a salary because of the security of payments.
Lots of people who invest in businesses lose all their money. You can't point at the very very peak performers who a) didn't lose their money and b) made a really valuable company instead, and decide that they owe you something other than what you agreed you would work for. That's just not how agreements work, and it's also the apex fallacy[0].
But there still needs to be some mechanism to limit wealth inequality or we still get the inevitable conclusion.
The US minimum wage hasn't changed in 16 years!
Which means many of these peak performers are built on the back of poverty, people who don't have the luxury of "freely agreeing" to take their labor elsewhere.
It's just not fair at all. Governments are funneling money to the rich hand over fist. It's obvious who they represent and who they don't.
You have to agree that trickle down is not trickling down.
I don't mind this, because minimum wage is a national minimum. States (and even more fine-grained than that) need to have contextualised minimum wage, or it's just silly. That's why it hasn't changed. Minimum wage increases wages at the expense of reducing employment, for any job that isn't worth that wage. You can't increase the national US minimum wage to what would get you an apartment in California and expect jobs to exist in Appalachia.
Honestly, the national minimum wage seems almost pointless. States should handle it, as they can contextualise at least a bit better.
And it not changing isn't evidence of anything when state-level minimum wages exist.
> Which means many of these peak performers are built on the back of poverty, people who don't have the luxury of "freely agreeing" to take their labor elsewhere.
Thus I don't think it means that. And also - your false dichotomy of you're either a wealthy business owner or you're on national minimum wage is not helpful either. People are paid what they can negotiate. Companies pay what they can negotiate. Companies exist if they charge a low enough price for their level of service or product. It's a tri-party system. The existence of other companies in in-demand businesses is what drives up wages, as if you don't like your job you can move, and people do. That's why I would say where possible, things that stop new companies springing up should be removed. Thinking it's all about national minimum wage is honestly the wrong approach, in my opinion.
> You have to agree that trickle down is not trickling down.
I don't know what this means. I didn't mention anything trickling down.
I was not implying that "you're either a wealthy business owner or you're on national minimum wage". You can safely substitute a "middle class" person, or even a "rich, but not super-rich" person, for "on national minimum wage", because in a few years I believe the middle class will completely cease to exist.
This is already happening and is actually the inevitable conclusion of all the funneling of money towards the super-rich and the subsequent increase in wealth inequality.
I wasn't even actually talking about business owners, but the super-rich that those business owners borrow money and pay interest to.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trickle-down_economics
That's the trickling down I'm talking about, which you didn't mention because it appears you don't think that som trickling down is even necessary.
Some trickle down or other mechanism to limit the rich from owning everything is necessary if that inevitable outcome of a tiny group of people owning absolutely everything is to be avoided.
Do you disagree with that?
I believe you're alluding to some kind of nearly perfect system where large businesses have not created artificial regulatory and other moats to protect their business and hamstring competitors.
eg, imagine a large factory that employs most of the people in an area. Potential workers for that factory do not have the ability to negotiate a fair wage, and also don't have the mobility to uproot their entire life to move somewhere else. Also another company cannot reasonably expect to move in and out-compete for the workers in that area. Thus the fictional factory is in a massively favorable position to "negotiate" wages for its workers.
I think we have largely differing views on the fundamental fairness of a system where low-paid workers are expected to negotiate with multinational corporations that already have all the advantages in any negotiation.
Those corporations are also able to monetize the profits from those workers productivity to actively lobby governments for even more favorable conditions in those "negotiations".
I believe it is a very unfair system.
I doubt we will end up finding a middle ground here if you do not think a system where the super-rich are not limited in some way from accumulating wealth is unfair.
If Elon Musk wanted to turn his Tesla holdings into cash, then his estimated net worth of $436 billion dollars would very rapidly not be worth anywhere near that much (i.e. probably by at least an order of magnitude).
I know that selling 23% of a company in one go would move the market, but a 90% haircut would be bonkers.
Or are you claiming TSLA is special, and the haircut would be 90% just for Elon and just for TSLA because that particular stock is super overvalued due to his celebrity and reality distortion field? That seems a little more believable, but this was a discussion on net worth of generic billionaires to start.
From this article in 2024: https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/warren-buffe...
There is additional context there explaining why Berkshire holding cash reserves is unique to their needs, and historically has only represented 17.5% of their total assets.
Billionaires and large firms are not sitting on piles of cash Scrooge McDuck style, because holding cash is costly.
The term "Billionaire" refers to a person who has total assets over a billion. In most cases those assets are shares in some company (or companies). It's not like they have a billion in their sock drawer.
By contrast, when at rest in my wallet, bitcoin is "dormant". It's not earning any interest and other not circulating in the economy. The only "growth" is capital growth.
That growth is predicted on demand outstripping supply. Or on "bigger fools". When the fools run out you're left with tulips.
They're billionaires because they own valuable companies, not because they have actual billions in the bank.
It was a terribly dangerous move for a sovereign country, worse than surrender to the Euro.
Real currencies circulate so the same dollar is spent by many people, benefiting each of them while you’re still holding onto your Bitcoin hoping it’ll reach $110k next. You do not want to live in a country where people are staying out of the local economy.
Japan already has houses worth $0 because Japan has run out of population growth to keep the demand for houses growing.
The same issue will occur in other countries that have low population growth. In New Zealand we have been importing people so house prices have been appreciating. However my impression is that other countries are competing for immigrants (NZ seems to be slowly relaxing our filters).
Also if you ever had a mortgage then you had a leveraged investment (often dangerously leveraged).
Not unless you explicitly choose to. If you own a house to have a roof above you, to have a comfortable and safe place for you and your family, if you love and care about that place, then that's what you are getting out of the house. Its monetary value changes are "just" a side story.
But if you buy a house purely as an investment, then yeah.
People are not paying into bitcoin expecting to redistribute their wealth to the insiders.