There are various ways to consider a loan, and surely any loan will have terms that cause it to cost money, and surely if the loan has favorable terms in regards to length of time and/or fees, then it could be worth while to enter. A loan can be used as a way to frontload an investment into bitcoin with income that has not yet come in. You should be able to pay off the loan no matter if bitcoin performs well or not during the term of the loan.
If bitcoin performs poorly then you might realize that the loan did not work to your advantage, and you would have had done better to just invest with your normal income and you would not have had to have had paid the fees.
If bitcoin performs well during the term of the loan, then of course, you will feel like a genius that you were able to buy more bitcoin than you otherwise would have had been able to buy through your regular income.
The main things are the fees, the term of the loan and your ability to pay back the loan, even if bitcoin goes to zero during the duration of the loan.
If you want to invest with debt and if you want to repay your debt with the money from that investment, then it will be a completely wrong decision. Because the goal of investment is to increase capital for the future, which is usually done through long-term planning.
If you cannot afford to pay your loan from income that is other than your bitcoin investment, then you likely cannot afford the loan.. and you are really too tightly cash strapped to be using debt as a leverage.
People are still going to take loans that they are not able to pay back in the event that their investment does not go well, and that will sometimes make persons worse off than they would have had been if they had not taken the loan.
It is better to strive to build up your finances in basic ways before you start to use debt, even though there are some kinds of debt that are really long term, such as student loans and even some housing loans can be quite long.
There are people who already own homes or they own equity in homes, and sometimes they will take out loans to use that money to live, so they get themselves into a worse and worse situation because their income is not high enough to pay for their loan.
That's quite a solid point you made about the potential risks associated with taking up loans without the financial foundations to back up the loan. It's worth noting that debt itself isn't completely a bad thing, as it can be really helpful in so many situations and circumstances, but the real challenge is when some folks considers loan to be some kind of shortcut simply because they currently lack the stability or the icome flow to manage the repayments of the loan, that's where it becomes a real problem. If after taking a loan and your only option of repaying that loan is by how well your investment does, or from the profits that that investment generates (especially when dealing with assets as volatile as Bitcoin) then what you're doing is simply borrowing money and gambling with it. And just imagine that the investment doesn't pay off, which of course is most likely to happen and you end up losing your funds, the end would so devastating that you would regret you had never taken the loan to invest in the first place. But if you've got the resources to repay the loan when it's due without having to depend on your investment and that repaying the loan wouldn't cause you any form of financial strains or mess with taking care of your essential expenses, then sure, you're more than free to take the loan and invest it.
Rather than a shortcut, it will be wiser to treat a loan as a kind of tool that works way better when your overall finances are completely in order. Long term loans, such as the student loans or mortgages can actually make a lot of sense, since they are actually tied to building skills or assets, but that doesn't mean that it's totally risk free, because if you lack the resources to comfortably cover the payments, it could still curse you financial strains and potentially become a problem for you. And what you said above, about how homeowners often borrow against equity clearly demonstrates how people can slowly trap themselves, as the house itself turns into less of a saftey net but a kind of a liability if their earnings can't actually keep pace.
And this is the exact reason why it is very crucial for folks to first of all, build savings, manage cash flows and solidify their overall financial position before reaching for any sort of leverage, because this way, debt, rather than being overwhelming, it turns out to be something you can easily control and use it deliberately. it is no longer something that seems to be your back up plan, or something that could potentially overwhelms you when things turn against you.