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The Rational Investor’s Case Against Bitcoin

Publish Date: May 03, 2024

Originally published at BiggerPockets by The BiggerPockets Money Podcast

Cryptocurrency enthusiasts can’t fathom why Bitcoin will fail. If you tell them that you’re not investing in Bitcoin or other cryptos, they look at you like an uneducated investor, a sheep following the crowd without thinking for yourself. The promise of Bitcoin is so great that you’d have to be an outright fool to deny it, and anyone who refutes the future golden age of a decentralized society is simply mistaken and is only coping with the oncoming collapse of fiat currency and Western civilization.

The problem with that theory? None of it is grounded in reality. Today, BiggerPockets CEO Scott Trench is going to prove it. After years of research on Bitcoin, the blockchain, and cryptocurrency as a whole, Scott has come to a simple conclusion: Bitcoin isn’t worth it. In fact, Bitcoin may be worth, unsurprisingly, nothing! But before all you Bitcoin maximalists come out of the woodwork, claiming we’re forever bullish on index funds and real estate, hear out Scott’s argument.

Scott will explain the case for Bitcoin and why its end goal is actually quite altruistic. However, five fatal flaws will stop Bitcoin from ever becoming a world reserve currency or replacing fiat money. Besides its fatal flaws, Bitcoin isn’t a foolproof cryptocurrency by any means, and we’ll prove it! Finally, Scott gives his Bitcoin price prediction and his recommendation if you do want to hold some Satoshis.

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Listen to the Podcast Here

Read the Transcript Here

Scott:
In this episode of the BiggerPockets Money Podcast, I Scott, one of our hosts am going to describe exactly what Bitcoin is, what the thesis behind Bitcoin is that is driving the zealousness that you may have seen from Bitcoin Maximalist. I’m going to break that down and inform you about why I rejected piece by piece, and I’m going to go through an exhaustive list of items about why Bitcoin has a fatal flaws that I think will potentially take it long-term value to zero. Stay tuned and let’s get into it. Bitcoin has a huge market capitalization. It’s got like $1.3 trillion in market capitalization. Each Bitcoin individual Bitcoin is now worth about $65,000 at the time we’re recording this video. And Bitcoin people, bitcoin maximalist, as I refer to them through the rest of this recording here, really have a passion for it. And that passion in many cases leads to a total lack of tolerance, empathy, and almost an aloof overconfidence when discussing the subject among other people.
I noticed in a recent Facebook thread that when I said, Hey, I actually don’t invest in Bitcoin because I understand it. A lot of Bitcoin people were politely but kind of aloof, incredulous like, oh, really? You did your homework and understand Bitcoin? I don’t think so. I don’t think you fully understand it if you’re not investing in it. And I’m like, guys, I understand it and I reject it. I’m not like some ignorant guy who hasn’t done my homework or what this, I consider it part of my profession in my career to understand these concepts of personal finance. And today I’m going to lay down my view on why I don’t like Bitcoin and just to couch that again. Am I against it philosophically? No. We’ve had Dr. Sine Amus on the BiggerPockets Money Podcast, episode 3 71. He’s the author of the Bitcoin Standard. Fascinating.
I love learning about Bitcoin. It’s an awesome experiment. It’s an awesome thesis in what money ought to be. I think there’s a lot of things to really empathize with and admire about the people who invest in Bitcoin and the experiment that is Bitcoin and the blockchain and there’s special symbiosis. So I really am looking forward to getting into it. And obviously you can tell I’m very passionate about the subject. Bitcoin is a digital currency. It is intended to be a form of what Bitcoin Maximalist or people who subscribe to the Austrian School of Economics call hard money. So the rationale at the highest level is a Bitcoin. Maximalist will believe that inflation is a prime evil in today’s society. Inflation eats away at the earnings or the wealth created by laypeople who are not investors. For example, if you just hoard dollars, you know they’re going to be worth probably at least 2% less every year, and many Bitcoin maximalists will argue it’ll be worth much less per year, and that inflation rates are vastly understated.
Bitcoin Maximalist will talk about how hard money has benefited societies for millennia. They’ll point to the fact that societies that have used gold, for example, which they believe is a form of hard money, have benefited greatly from the fact that people were able to preserve their wealth and that eras where gold was money were really kind of golden ages for human society. So what makes gold a hard money? And I think that gold really understanding gold is absolutely critical to understanding the Bitcoin thesis. By the way, gold is hard money in the sense that you can’t create a lot of it. People have tried to create gold for millennia through the practice of alchemy, which has failed over and over and over and over and over again. Gold is an element, so it cannot be created or destroyed. Gold never rusts or decays, so it can infinitely preserve value.
Gold is very easy to melt and smelt into small components or bring together and make into coins or bars or other things there. It’s because it’s so rare and small, it’s relatively easy to transport and store. So in a lot of ways, gold is this ideal form of money. And civilizations over the millennia have a greed with this thesis. That’s why gold has been such an important form of money for so long throughout history and other forms of money have kind of come and gone over those times periods. So what Bitcoin maximalism is, is bitcoin. Maximalist believe that Bitcoin is almost like digital gold. It’s a version of gold, but better for the 21st century and beyond. Bitcoin’s a scarce resource. Only 21 bitcoins can ever be mined in a long-term future state. So that creates an inherent scarcity like gold. Bitcoin also has a very limited stock to flow ratio.
So there’s certain amount of Bitcoins that are in existence today, and only a small percentage of them, about one or 2% per year will be mined over the next 120, 140 years according to Bitcoin optimists until the last one is mined. So that’s going to create a low flow of these coins and make it very hard for there to be an increase in supply. And the Bitcoin Maximus will contrast this scarce resource with a fiat currency like the US dollar and say, Hey, the Federal Reserve can print money at a whim, right? And if the federal deficit goes up, the temptation to print money and inflate the way out of government problems is going to be very high, and the dollar is going to go down and down and down and down and down, and people will eventually turn to Bitcoin and that this will happen one society after another.
These governments are going to out print or print their currencies, print too much money and their currency, their value of their currencies will inflate and people will turn naturally to a much better alternative like a gold. Although Bitcoin Maximus believe that Bitcoin is the answer here. Another component to Bitcoin that Bitcoin Maximus think is really critical is these folks are often grounded in this very libertarian school of thought. So Austrian School of Economics, libertarianism, these folks believe that decentralization is better. And again, I empathize with some of these things. There’s lots to like here. I think that I am sure many of my friends are Bitcoin. I know many of my friends are Bitcoin maximalist. I would love to have discussions about these types of things and probably would agree on many of these issues. But the central tenet of decentralization is so critical to the Bitcoin thesis and its special symbiosis with the blockchain like gold, there’s a finite supply of bitcoins that can never be mined like gold.
Bitcoin is going to be very expensive and difficult to mine, very limited stock to flow ratio. Bitcoin like gold. Bitcoin can be broken out into tiny increments. 100 million Satoshis make up one Bitcoin. So you can divide Bitcoin by up to 100 million, making it a very powerful theoretical option for everyday transactions, for example. Now, unlike gold and better than gold, a Bitcoin Maximus will argue Bitcoin has the added advantages of being able to be transacted digitally. And that digital transaction takes place on a remarkably immutable, secure, and transparent ledger called the blockchain, which a Bitcoin maximalist, by the way, believes is a special purpose-built technology exclusively for Bitcoin. Bitcoin Maximalist actually are not big fans of blockchain technology, which people may have heard who aren’t familiar with this as like this saving grace for all these other applications. Bitcoin maximas believe that blockchain technology is only valuable for the application of Bitcoin.
And don’t worry, I’ll get into the blockchain later on this and we’ll no doubt plenty more as we get going here on that. So this leads us to our core thesis, right? Bitcoin maximalism believes that governments and societies that use fiat currency today will one by one succumb to the temptation to inflate their way out of their problems, and the people of those societies will turn to a better form of money. These governments and societies will be forced one by one to adopt Bitcoin as a hard money and in the not so distant future, Bitcoin will be money for most or all people in the world. So a Bitcoin Maximalist literally believes that the long-term value of Bitcoin is essentially that of all of the world’s outstanding currency, it’ll replace all dollars, all you want, all euros, all yen, every other currency you can imagine.
And that means that leads to a long-term market cap of tens of trillions of today’s dollars, maybe hundreds of trillions of dollars in future value, future inflated dollar there. And what’s more these Bitcoin maximas believe that this is good for society, that the common person is going to experiments, experience unimaginable wealth and benefits from this transition, that innovation is going to flourish, the economy is going to stabilize, and that without inflation to worry about, the common people are going to consume less leading to happier, more productive and more sustainable living. They think that governments will be forced to enter into sustainable fiscal policy as a result of this change, spending less than they take in, and that those that can’t are going to dissolve and reform. It’s like that’s the thesis, right? Bitcoin Maximus believe, invest in Bitcoin, watch the man collapse, make a nearly infinite return and do good for society, and what’s more it’s like, that’s awesome, right?
It’s a great thesis, it’s admirable, it’s cool, right? It’s libertarian and I completely respect the intention. I admire the detail and thought and intricacy of Satoshi Nakamoto, the inventor of Bitcoin, and it’s just fun to learn about and talk about this experiment in the path to perfect money. So I just want to couch that there’s no evil, there’s no bad intent, there’s no lack of intelligence. Bitcoin maximalist are zealous, but they’re not like evil. They’re not manipulating other people. They truly believe in this thesis. So that’s the philosophy behind Bitcoin. It’s a noble purpose. It’s designed to fix what the inventor, Satoshi Nakamoto thinks are real societal issues that we’re faced with today. And the technology is really cool and really ambitious. So you might be saying to yourself, okay, that sounds gravy. Let’s go buy some Bitcoin not so fast. After the break, I’m going to break down the reasons why I reject this thesis and do not invest in Bitcoin.
Welcome back to the show everybody. Before the break, I stepped into the shoes of a Bitcoin maximalist and tried to empathize. I’m now going to make the case for why rational investors should not invest in Bitcoin and why I don’t. First, at the end of the day, Bitcoin is intended to be a store of value, a digital currency money. I’m an investor. I don’t invest in currency. I keep the very minimum amount of currency that I need to secure my short-term liquidity needs and to sleep well at night. And then I invest the rest in cash flowing assets like real estate, stocks, businesses, and other debt or other private opportunities, even in a world with truly perfect hard money that was deflationary, I would put my capital to work trying to create real inflation adjusted wealth, not stored in Bitcoin and allow it to collect digital dust.
Second, I believe in the United States, it’s people, economy and military. I do not believe that it or its currency are going to collapse or decline in a relative sense. In my lifetime, I believe that I’m going to earn spend and pay taxes with dollars not bitcoins for the duration of my entire life. And not only that, but I believe that this will be true for everyone I know, for all of my kids, for all of their future descendants, for many generations I have and will continue to happily bet against anybody who wants to take the opposite stance and believe that believes that the US is going to fall. And I’ll do that by passively investing in low fee index funds. If I do that, I believe I’m going to passively absorb the wealth of almost everyone who invests in Bitcoin or otherwise predicts doomed day and the decline of western civilization in the United States.
Third, if I believed that the United States government and the US dollar was going to collapse or decline materially on the world stage, I’d invest in a bunker guns and ammo, canned corn and other resources like that, not Bitcoin. Fourth, if I did believe that the government of the United States would collapse and the US dollar would collapse without ending my way of life as I know it, I’d bet on another government controlled currency or future cryptocurrency replacing the dollar. Fifth, I believe that Bitcoin maximalist miss the fact that Bitcoin as a potential theoretical future currency has fatal flaws that make it an extremely unlikely candidate in the extremely unlikely event that the world does adopt a future reserve currency. Bitcoin has huge technical problems, and I think that a future iteration of Bitcoin, namely a future cryptocurrency that does not exist yet will likely resolve those issues.
Okay, let’s use it. I had a Bitcoin, maximalist challenged me on this thesis the other day, and they said, look at the British Empire. It has completely faded. It used to span the whole world. And I’m like, this is a terrible example. This is perfectly fitting into my rationale here. The great British pound has been used since seven 60 ad, so that is almost what, 1300 years of continuous use of a government currency over that time period. During some of that, it was backed by gold during some other times it wasn’t. But that currency has survived and so has that government. If you are a UK resident, you have lived your life and using great British pounds for the entire time. You’ll probably, whenever you pass away, your estate will still be using great British pounds, and your children and their children’s children will probably continue to be using those.
I believe that’s the same general state of the United States. The United States. Also, if we really want to get into it, I think we have a lot of advantages. We have a ton of problems, but every problem and advantage is relative on the world scale. We have a tremendous amount of abundant natural resources here compared to other large countries around the world. Our population segment is really stable. We have plenty of young people compared to places like China, Japan, Western Europe, those areas. We have immigration. People want to move to the United States from all around the world. So whenever we decide how we’re going to handle immigration, we will have a flow of people who want to be here and make their lives here. So those are not trivial advantages and like, yes, we have problems. We can’t agree on anything our government spends more than it brings in, but we have again, this very stable resource base and population base.
We also have the world’s strongest military, so it’s like what other country would you rather bet on? Long-term? It hasn’t been profitable to bet against the United States for the last 50 years, and I don’t think it’s going to be profitable to big against the United States in the next 50 years. And look, people are going to disagree with that. That’s totally fine. But don’t call me and the people who invest in stocks, us, us real estate ignorant because we don’t believe that the United States is going to collapse. I’m just happy to bet against you. I’m happy to bet against somebody who thinks that the world is going to collapse or Western civilization is going to collapse, and I believe I’m going to passively absorb your wealth over that time period. So Bitcoin is not just a potential store of value. It would actually be deflationary in a long-term sense, perhaps significantly so if the vision of a Bitcoin maximalist was realized, remember that Bitcoin supply is ultimately finite according to Bitcoin optimists who believe that it’ll be adopted as a world reserve currency, the last Bitcoin will be mined in 2140.
So once they’re all mined, the only thing that can happen is for the supply to decrease, and people will guard their precious resources in this future hypothetical state where Bitcoin has taken over and the last one has been mined very jealously, but still people will die, people will lose their keys that store the information about how to access and transmit Bitcoin. And so the supply will actually shrink over a long period of time, and that is going to compound this deflationary problem of no more mining, more, no more Bitcoins being mined here. I’m not aware of any democratic or capitalistic civilization that has endured with a deflationary currency over a long period of time, because if you truly do have a deflationary currency, it says that the best thing you can do is to hoard that currency and not to invest in assets and other things because the currency is what’s going up in value.
That creates huge problems here over a long period of time. I also want to call out that the incentive to mine Bitcoin, this act of securing the blockchain that is so critical and goes so hand in hand with the Bitcoin thesis. Where’s the incentive to continue expending this computing power on an individualized basis once the last Bitcoin is mined? So there’s an end game problem here for Bitcoin that there’s the various theories on how to solve, but I’m skeptical of at to a certain point, and I think that we’re going to see that problem emerge as Bitcoin mining as housing events happen for Bitcoin mining. Okay, second, Bitcoin transactions are super expensive and impractical for day-to-day use. So this is called the Bitcoin scalability challenge. And basically the problem is that because the blockchain requires so much computing power to secure transacting, Bitcoin is fairly expensive.
It actually costs about one to $3 to make a transaction on the blockchain here. And so the world does not possess and will not possess for the foreseeable future enough computing power for the blockchain to process anywhere near enough transactions to allow Bitcoin to be used as day-to-day currency. So if Bitcoin was widely adopted, the price to transact Bitcoin would skyrocket. Now, the community has proposed and implemented various solutions to this problem, each of which has pros and cons, but true decentralization and mass payment processing are still a long way off for Bitcoin, for Bitcoin users if it ever comes despite these increasingly clever mechanisms. And then I also want to call out, there’s another problem here where why was the world able to move off of a gold standard in the first place? Well, what happened here is the US government bought and world governments basically bought a lot of gold and then used that gold to back their currencies and then move their currencies to fiat.
That same scenario, there’s nothing that would exist to prevent governments from purchasing Bitcoin from their people in the event that, and then moving it back to a fiat currency at some future state, Bitcoin has no solution for that particular problem. Okay, next up, Bitcoin is not practical for most purposes going forward. So Bitcoin is super volatile right now and is going to remain very volatile, even according to Bitcoin optimists for the foreseeable future. That means that unless you’re really bold, you’re not going to put your down payment for your next house and buy Bitcoin to save up for that. You’re not going to buy Bitcoin to save up for your kids’ college fund. You’re not going to save up Bitcoin to buy Bitcoin to save up for your next vacation because of that volatility. You can’t save for a near term or objective that you know need that liquidity for in the next couple of years.
Again, unless you’re very bold, very few people are going to do that. Second, another one here is that Bitcoin is not widely accepted for payments or goods of services. I’m not going to accept my salary and Bitcoin, and I cannot easily use Bitcoin to purchase goods or services or pay my taxes to the US government. Again, I’m a US citizen. The people who do choose to accept Bitcoin as a form of payment often have problems with this, right? So if you receive payment in Bitcoin in 2024, for example, that’s worth a million dollars, and by the time you go to pay taxes in 2025 that Bitcoin is worth $500,000, you have a real problem on your hands from a liquidity perspective. So a lot of people have come into this problem and years past. Another problem with Bitcoin, Bitcoin’s a huge environmental concern. Bitcoin mining consumes an incredible amount of energy, and a large portion of the world’s population is not going to be aligned with adopting a currency with such large environmental consequences.
So while a small fragment of libertarians who again we can empathize with and admire in some cases may love this concept of decentralized currency, many more people are likely to be like, no, we’re not going to expend a ridiculous amount of computing to stabilize our currency. We’re comfortable with some centralization for this. Again, a lot of these issues are solvable in future state cryptocurrency iterations. So a bet on Bitcoin is also a bet against some future invention solving many of the issues that I just discussed. So yes, you can make some software updates and other variations to the blockchain to mitigate some of these issues, but there’s always going to be an easier perpetual flow of better theoretical alternatives to Bitcoin. In my opinion, I’ll keep going here. I also think that there’s just no such thing as a truly trustless marketplace. So even when I transmit Bitcoin to someone on the blockchain, I’m trusting them to deliver whatever good or service.
If I want to buy a pizza on the blockchain, I’m trusting somebody else to deliver me that pizza after I transmit Bitcoin, somebody has to enforce that contract. That’s a centralized government that has physical power. So this true decentralization vision, I think is unlikely to be ever realized in there. Bitcoin also does not prevent, contrary to what Bitcoin Maximalist will say, the booms and busts of modern economies or resolve the problems of fractional reserve banking, please look up fractional reserve banking. I would love to explain it, but that would take us down a big rabbit hole here. You can perform fractional reserve banking on any currency. So cryptocurrency investors learned this the hard way with the fall of major cryptocurrency exchanges like FTX, and these are lessons that the US financial markets experienced in the early 20th century that these new attempts at World Reserve currencies are finding out and discovering all over again the lessons learned from these other centuries are just being repeated in the cryptocurrency markets.
So I think that the vision of true decentralization and trustless transactions is unlikely to be realized or necessary any future point, and that while governments have collapsed and will continue to collapse, the new governments that emerge from those collapses are not necessarily going to turn to Bitcoin. Alright, if you’re still with me and you’re still not convinced after the break, I’m going to lay down the rest of my case. Welcome back to the show. And if you’re enjoying this, I want to dig in even more. I just want to let you know that I wrote an entire blog post getting into the nitty gritty of this. It’s at biggerpockets.com/bitcoin blog. Go read that and leave a comment on why you agree or disagree. Let’s discuss it. So next I want to talk about the blockchain, right? This is like a Bitcoin Maximalist aced in the hole.
Again, blockchain’s an accounting record of Bitcoin transactions from the beginning of time. Anybody can go at any time and look at the blockchain and see who currently holds Bitcoin and the entire history of transactions. When someone tries to send Bitcoin, the rest of the network collectively verifies the transaction. Instead of having a person like a central bank or like the Fed, an accountant or bureaucrat, we have the Bitcoin network verifies this transaction through a technical process called proof of work. So essentially, the network competes to solve a very difficult technical problem that requires a lot of computing power to prove, but once proven can be verified easily by the rest of the network, and they compete to solve this technical problem because the network rewards them with Bitcoin. That process is called Bitcoin mining. And this is what makes the Bitcoin network so secure is so many people from so many places around the world are competing to solve these problems, that there’s no one person that is needed to verify that a transaction is legitimate.
So to hack the blockchain, somebody would need an unimaginable computing power. They’d need more than 50% of the computing power currently being devoted to mining Bitcoin and securing the blockchain. So this is as secure a ledger as almost anything can imagine in the real world. It’s also the reason why Bitcoin mining consumes so much energy output more than 27,000 terawatt hours, which is more than many small countries last year. A true Bitcoin maximalist, again, does not believe that the Bitcoin is good technology for any other application because for example, in the medical record space, unless somebody is devoting a tremendous amount of computing power to maintaining a medical record blockchain, it’s in theory possible that someone with a really powerful computing network could hack that blockchain take over with more than 50% of the computing power and rewrite history, and that would be a problem.
So blockchain technology is only useful as a secure decentralized ledger in one application according to Bitcoin maximalism, which is money itself, Bitcoin as a single worldwide backed currency. And for the record, I agree with Bitcoin maximalism on this point. I think that true decentralized blockchain technology is not a useful secure, decentralized application for anything but a theoretical future state where Bitcoin is a world reserve currency. A couple of other items that I want to go through, sharp ratio Bitcoin Maximalist will talk about how great Bitcoin sharp ratio is. A sharp ratio is a way of measuring returns relative to risk. So Bitcoin Maximalist will talk about how Bitcoin has this incredible ratio of returns relative to risk. But this is kind of a silly argument in my view, because Bitcoin was worth zero when it was invented, and now it’s worth something. Anything that goes from zero to one has an essentially infinite sharp ratio, and so that allows anybody to conveniently look back at any point in over the last 15 years and make in many cases an argument for an incredible sharp ratio.
So don’t let someone use that gem of an argument and get away with it as a defense of Bitcoin. Another big point from Bitcoin people, the El Salvador experiment in 2021, El Salvador became the first and still the only country to make Bitcoin legal tender. So this is apparently a huge victory for Bitcoin enthusiasts. A clear point where, Hey, my thesis that world governments are going to collapse and turn to Bitcoin is being validated. Oops, two years later, less than 1% of central bank remittances in El Salvador were in Bitcoin. So it turns out the locals don’t really accept Bitcoin, and you’re absolutely going to need alternative forms of currency to enjoy a visit to El Salvador, although in some places, mostly tourists can enjoy the experience of using Bitcoin to pay for very highly marked up goods and services. So this has been widely documented, including a Bitcoin enthusiast.
It’s not exactly a shining example of how this is going to work. Okay, another point. The current valuation is not a endorsement of the future potential of Bitcoin. The fact that a currency that has this many problems is at all time highs is an indication of risk, not validation of a thesis. Okay? Now all that is my argument against Bitcoin. I want to concede one point to Bitcoin Maximalist here to close things out. So contrary to popular belief, Bitcoin is not really a good tool for criminals. Remember all of the secure applications of the blockchain and how clear and immutable ledger that is, well, for criminal transactions, that actually makes it remarkably easy for government agencies to track criminal activity and catch criminals. This has been widely documented, and people who are dealing drugs or using Bitcoin to transact on illegal activities are often caught using the blockchain fairly easily by government agencies.
So don’t walk away from today’s call thinking that Bitcoin is actually going to be a great tool for criminals only the most technically sophisticated and very smart folks who know how to hide things on how to really mask their activity and the blockchain are going to be able to get away with it long term. So all that said, I think that the long-term value of Bitcoin is zero. I do not believe that Bitcoin has a 1% or 0.1% or whatever probability weighting you want to give to it of replacing all of the world currencies or some of the world currencies in a long-term sense as legal tender as money itself. I don’t hold anything in Bitcoin. And again, I’m not saying that the Bitcoin maximalism thesis is wrong. I guess I kind of am saying that it’s wrong, at least for me from a belief standpoint.
But I’m not saying it’s crazy. It’s not like it’s not grounded in a reasonable school of thought. You have just know that if you’re going to invest in Bitcoin, you have to disagree with what I said. You have to ascribe some probability of the collapse or decline of major world governments and the replacement of their currency with Bitcoin to some non-zero probability, and just understand that that’s the bet that you’re fundamentally making and that a Bitcoin max most is fundamentally making. And I think that that leads me to a logical place. What should a rational person who’s racking into this video and saying, Scott, I disagree with you. I think there is a probability of investing in Bitcoin. What should you do? Well, my recommendation would be that you should treat Bitcoin as part of your cash world, right? Understand that it’s part of your cash world.
That could go to zero, or it could go up to some expense. But think about it as part of your cash position. So for example, if you had $120,000 in cash, you might consider putting 40 in US dollars, 40 in gold, and 40 in Bitcoin. If you subscribe to the belief that Bitcoin could take over as a future state world reserve currency to some degree, and that might help you achieve some of the goal of preserving that wealth in a relative sense and giving you some liquidity. But again, I believe that it’s much more likely that this runs the risk of a near or complete wipe out in the long run and extreme volatility in the short run. So I do not do that personally. Alright, if you got this far, I really appreciate you taking the time to listen to my impassioned speech on Bitcoin here.
I’ll point out that even if I turn out to be dead wrong and the Bitcoin takeover does happen without the collapse of my way of life as I know it, then I will just transition to taking my dividends and rental income in Satoshis instead of dollars. The real value of my collected rent and the dividends that I have in my portfolio will remain relatively constant even in that event where Bitcoin does take over. That’s the real value of the wealth that those companies and my rental properties are producing regardless of which currency or which form of money is flowing through the underlying assets. Just to remind everybody, again, thank you for listening. I welcome a rebuttal and debate on this topic. This is my view. It’s not the view of BiggerPockets, it’s not the view of the other people it host podcasts at BiggerPockets. It’s probably not the view of many in the community. We’ve had Dr. ine Amus on the BiggerPockets Money podcast, author of the Bitcoin Standard. We would welcome another guest in the future who wants to rebut many of the points I’ve made. Just don’t tell me that I haven’t done enough homework, please, because I’ll get really annoyed about it. I’ve done plenty of homework on this subject and I understand it. I’m happy for rational informed debate and disagreement though. So again, if you listen this far, thank you so much and look forward to seeing you in the next episode of the BiggerPockets Money podcast.

Outro:
BiggerPockets Money was created by Mindy Jensen and Scott Treach, produced by Hija Ed, by Exodus Media Copywriting by Nate Weintraub. And lastly, a big thank you to the BiggerPockets team for making this show possible.

Watch the Episode Here

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In This Episode We Cover

  • The rational investor’s case against Bitcoin and why it’s NOT an investment
  • The reasons why Bitcoin could change society for the better (but probably won’t)
  • Five fatal flaws of Bitcoin that will stop it from ever taking over fiat currency
  • How adopting Bitcoin could lead to a crashing economy with no growth
  • The blockchain’s big problems and proof that the world isn’t ready to adopt cryptocurrency
  • Scott’s long-term Bitcoin price prediction that will shock Bitcoin maximalists
  • And So Much More!

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Note By BiggerPockets: These are opinions written by the author and do not necessarily represent the opinions of BiggerPockets.

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