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Whenever I tell my friends, colleagues, or people on online forums who joined Bitcoin that it is not smart to trade away anything for Bitcoin because it offers neither utility nor a systemic return, their universal response is always the same. They claim it is a currency, a token designed simply to facilitate trade, and not a commodity or a stock.
Then I explain that not a single currency in human history has existed without either utility or return. When money was commodity-based, it could be used outside of its monetary role. Today, in our fiat system where money is debt-based, debtors to commercial and central banks provide a return to money holders prior to every debt repayment. They give them either products, services, labor, or tax settlements to get the money for these repayments.
A Bitcoin investment provides neither because bitcoins are just digital fractions of a fixed number, twenty-one million, imagined by an unknown programmer. This programmer simply wrote a protocol to assign these fractions to addresses, relying on a network that records and cryptographically secures everything in a decentralized database. Anyone who trades away anything to hold these digital fractions will receive nothing from the programmer or the network. It is not like PayPal, Revolut or "stablecoin" issuers, which redeem their digital balances for fiat currency.
Unfortunately, I have realized that none of these people actually care. They are so emotional about the fact that some people made a lot of money trading Bitcoin that no rational argument can reach them. What's more, they often even get offended when you critically evaluate their investment.
But once the hype is gone, these investors will finally realize what it truly means to invest in something that offers neither utility nor systemic return. By then, however, it will be far too late.