I had this tab open on my phone for like a month, but finally actually read it. And I liked it, even though a popular take in Forbes:
For generations, conventional wisdom has dictated that real estate is one of the safest and most reliable ways to store wealth. Unlike stocks, bonds, or cash in a bank account, real estate is tangible. You can touch it, live in it, and pass it down for the enjoyment of your children and grandchildren. It is this physicality that has given real estate its status as a foundational asset class for wealth preservation.
Bitcoin, on the other hand, has long been dismissed by traditional investors as the opposite. Critics say it has no physical presence. Unlike real estate, you can’t touch bitcoin, you can’t live in it, and it’s hard to insure. It’s just code, they say. How can something so ephemeral be a store of value?
This came off (at least a little bit) about the natural disasters in NC and Calif... look, your house can go away. Its physicality, while nice and feeling "real" it's also its major drawback: it's limited and subject to natural forces.
"If a fire wipes out your home, your bitcoin remains untouched. If a hurricane devastates an entire town, your bitcoin holdings are exactly as they were before. If war breaks out and you’re forced to flee across a border, you don’t have to abandon your wealth. You can take it with you simply by remembering a secret."
The physicality of bitcoin is fascinating. It's unique, nonreplicable, but physical; digital scarcity in a realm where everything can be copy-pasted.
Bitcoin, too, is kind of real: bitcoins(!) exist as points on an elliptic curve. As Knut Svanholm puts it, bitcoin is the missing piece of the periodic table: an element without mass. (#798342, #73535).
Great read.