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Opportunity cost has been tremendous and even worse so for those who sold their bitcoin and bought something like a car that suffers from depreciation, which means they sell an asset with upside potential to then buy an asset that loses in value over time. If someone buys a house and rents it out, then so be it if economic circumstances led them to think that decision would be best for them personally. But so far I am not sure there was a situation when bitcoin was high and real estate was low. Real estate prices went through the roof when bitcoin went through the roof because of that low interest rate environment.
Surely folks are tempted by houses and cars, and each of them might have some utility value, but yeah, there can be miscalculations in regards to what they are worth and how costly of a car or house is needed and even if many houses actually appreciate in value rather than potentially just holding their value, but then accounting for many of the maintenance costs and other costs, there can be losses with houses that are not always appreciated when going through the calculations.
For example, if we might have had wanted to buy a $300k house back in 2019, then maybe we might have had spent anywhere between 30 to 90 bitcoin on such a house (of course depending on exactly when we bought such house), yet even if the house price had doubled in the past 6 years and now such house is worth $600k,, right now such house would ONLY cost us right around 7 BTC... so it sometimes can be difficult to measure which asset is better to hold, and people will frequently proclaim that merely because bitcoin has appreciated at such levels in the past, it does not mean that bitcoin is going to out perform houses in the future. Many times folks are employing faulty thinking and failure/refusal to actually appreciate what has been happening in bitcoin, what continues to happen in bitcoin, and what is likely to happen in the future.
Sure, there is no problem considering that bitcoin's rate of appreciation is not likely to go up as much as it had done historically, yet at the same time, there should not be any big stretches of imagination needed to continue to recognize that bitcoin remains a better place to put value... but yeah, people are not going to believe it, and so those of us investing into bitcoin or going to continue to enjoy the benefits of asymmetric information, even though anyone has equal opportunities to study bitcoin so that they can get started and get off of zero rather than continuing to remain sitting on the sidelines.. and continuing to be screwed by the ongoing debasement of the dollar and dollar related assets.
Temptation is a big one and it depends on how you have grown up, probably on how old you are and whether you have any experience with investments and compound effects. If you in your early 20s, never had a great car or any car at all, never had any experience with strategically building an investment, risk is not low that someone as I described flips BTC for a nice car. No doubt that the person will know later down the road it was a mistake. The car would in fact be a much bigger mistake than a house unless it is a mansion for fun and not for renting it out.
I can tell that experience is a big one. If you went through a time of wrong decisions especially in personal finance, usually it is painful enough to make you remember and improve upon it. It is unlikely that someone would flip something with high potential for a fancy car again later on in life. Could still be, but less likely.
Ultimately it doesn't matter what other people do as long as they are not one of these trolls on social media advising everyone to do the same as they do. Some people made life-changing money and that is good for them if they are in peace with their decision, but the majority of people I talk to share the same problem, sold too early and reget it and they could have decided otherwise. Some have to sell as special circumstances can occur beyond what someone's risk assessment was at first, but that doesn't apply to the maority.
Sometimes we might consider that many folks might improve their situation by adjusting their position size, but much of their problem relates to failure/refusal to study the asset that they are invested into in order to recognize and/or appreciate what they are holding. So surely, I have no problem with folks who may well choose to not study deeply into bitcoin when they are first getting started and while they are establishing their cashflow management systems; however, as they invest and the more value that they have invested into bitcoin, they should become inspired to know more and more about the asset in which they had invested, but they end up not knowing much if anything about bitcoin beyond number go up, and so when number does not continue to go up within their expectations (timeline and/or quantity), they abandon ship.
The very early years, we were all about studying the matter and playing around with it and believing in the potential, not hoping for unknown reasons. That's a big difference. But the more the media got involved and uninformed and actually uninterested people got involved, the less studying there has been. I am certain you have been confronted countless of times whether someone should invest or not and you were supposed to give the ultimate answer. It's no fun to tell anyone where to put their money. An exception is family when you know they can bear it and want to be involved at their own risk, but what I have noticed is that many people are not willing to put in some minor effort to get the basics and lead a basic discussion with you for five minutes. They can repeat the typical slogans from the bestsellers, I am sure you know what I mean, but if you ask one question about such a slogan, they are out.
Risk taking capacity has huge impact though and that is why the rich get richer. They don't have the same thoughts when their bitcoin investment went up 100x as someone who has less risk taking capacity and feels bad about holdig because of fearing to lose it when simultaneously that person believes in the investment to increase in price further.
It surely does help when folks have more discretionary income (or even wealth) in which they can work with, even though surely anyone can benefit greatly from bitcoin as long as they have a discretionary income, and many times, poor people will tend to have way less discretionary income, yet there still might be some poor people who have a lot of discretionary income, but they are just managing their discretionary income in inferior ways.
That kind of goes back to what I meant about experience because often times when someone has access to excess resources and is not a spoiled brat, they usually know a thing about investments and patience and portfolios and size adjustments and risk management etc.
The category
poor people with good income is the worst because they are wasting an amazing life opportunity. You can waste a fraction of it and learn from it and I think that is what most people are going through, making mistakes in the right moments is sometimes the best that can happen to you. But I know that in bitcoin many people wasted a once in a lifetime chance for the many in a lifetime things, just because they didn't have them before or are part of the
poor people with good income group.