Conflating volatility with risk
There's a lot of misinformation out there when it comes to people giving financial advice while simultaneously pretending as though they aren't giving financial advice. Spoiler alert: this post is financial advice. I will not be saying "not financial advice". That is a thing ignorant people say who don't understand securities law. I will not tell you to do your own research. You are literally doing a little research right now simply by reading this post, are you not? Should you get a second opinion? Maybe, that's up to you on a personal level.
Conflating volatility with risk
Lot's of people in finance like the make blanket statements as though they apply to every situation. People who invest in real-estate or dividend stocks often like to pretend that investing in any asset that doesn't provide passive income is really just a "gamble". As if they've unlocked the secrets of investing and there's no other way to do it other than the strategy they use. Other's will dunk on crypto as "illegitimate" because they don't submit a quarterly earnings report like their favorite corporation does. Who cares if securities can print their asset out of thin air as long and the company is turning a profit, right?
Not a security
Ultimately my favorite quote from these type of midwits is this idea that Bitcoin doesn't belong in a retirement account. Why doesn't it belong in a retirement account? Well, it's too volatile! You shouldn't be gambling with your future like that! It's irresponsible!
In reality it's irresponsible to not have Bitcoin in your retirement account, and this has been the case for many years now. In fact the entire premise of a retirement account negates the very volatility that midwits claim Bitcoin has.
Here is the chart dating back to 2013.
Bitcoin only goes up. In fact it only goes up so hard that you can't even see what it did in 2013 on a linear scale. In order to see what Bitcoin does on long timescales (the type of timescale you use for a retirement account) you can't even chart it linearly, it has to be done on the base-10 logarithmic scale in which every notch is 10x higher than the last one. No other asset in the history of ever has needed this kind of functionality to track the exponential growth over long swaths of time. Bitcoin has rightly been classified a "unicorn asset" due to these only-up mechanics of the network.
HODL?
So not only is Bitcoin an only-up asset over time but quite exponentially so. Price crashed 80% in 2013, 2017, and 2021? Irrelevant. In fact that is a feature not a bug, as it wipes out all the weakness and scams from the market and breeds newfound strength... you know... the thing that real capitalism does when you aren't subsidizing failed zombie corporations with taxpayer money. Being in the red for a year or two is irrelevant in a retirement account. This shouldn't even have to be explained, but in a world where people legitimately believe that 2.1 Quadrillion sats isn't scarce, I suppose anything is possible.
Give a man a pizza and he'll eat for a day, but cut that pizza into a quadrillion slices and he'll eat for a quadrillion days.
The entire theme behind the HODL ideology was to stack sats and not worry about the volatility over long periods of time. What does a retirement account do? It holds assets for a long period of time without having to worry about short-term volatility. So not only is Bitcoin appropriate for a retirement account but also a retirement account is arguably the very first place Bitcoin should be appropriated.
Conflating volatility with risk
Risk and volatility are completely different things, but are often considered the same thing. You might not want to put a tech stock in your retirement account. Why? Because it's risky. Tech can be outdated. What looks good today can be completely outdated tomorrow. A decade ago it looked like Google would be the only game in town for the end of time. Now the advent of AI shows us that anyone can build their own Google from scratch with a $10k rig and open source tech like Deepseek. Google stock could crash to zero if open-source solutions render that model obsolete.
But what if Bitcoin is rendered obsolete?
What about all these other tokens? What if one of them takes over and leaves the Bitcoiners in the dust? This is a logically inconsistent narrative that can't happen for a couple of different reasons. The most glaring one is that none of these thousands of cryptocurrencies is even attempting to be a better Bitcoin. Bitcoin does a couple things very well, a couple things very poorly, and doesn't even attempt half of the stuff these other coins are doing (for good reason). The tradeoffs are heavy.
Making a "faster" crypto is not competing with Bitcoin. Being "fast" is not something Bitcoin cares about or needs. Having smart contracts on other platforms does not make Bitcoin less valuable. It makes Bitcoin more valuable because Bitcoin is heavily connected to everything else through the liquidity pools. The idea that open-source tech competes like corporations would compete with each other showcases ignorance through blind projection. Linux Mint doesn't compete with Linux Ubuntu does not compete with Kali Linux. Literally nobody cares. Use what you want.
The other big reason why Bitcoin can't just up and die like a corporation/security is that Bitcoin is a network and a community that exists from bottom up architecture rather than top-down CEO leadership and intellectual property. You can't send a cease and desist to community; just ask China. Bitcoin can't declare bankruptcy or even go bankrupt to begin with. If big players leave they are replaced immediately. It's antifragile just like life itself. A person or individual can die easily, but a community or group is much harder to kill.
Will businesses even need bank loans to scale up?
Why sell your soul to the banks when you can just store value in an asset that just goes up? $3M is nothing. Are VCs being deprecated? Guess we'll find out.
What about something like Hive?
Should you put Hive into your retirement account if it becomes an option? Absolutely not. Platforms like ETH and HIVE can and have changed their economic models based on the decisions of a small group. That's a great case to be made that it's too risky to throw into the retirement account. However, that's not even the main reason it shouldn't be done.
DPOS vs BTC
The biggest reason to avoid throwing something like Hive into a retirement account is that you're giving governance powers to a centralized entity. BTC in a retirement account can't affect Bitcoin governance, but Hive or any other proof-of-stake coin in a retirement account chips away at the security of the chain. Same with leaving your assets on an exchange: a problem in which we are already painfully familiar with. I don't know about you but I don't want some intern from Blackrock upvoting posts, witnesses, and DHF projects on our network. That's sounding like a nightmare scenario to me. Pass.
Conclusion
The reason why finance bros tell you not to put Bitcoin into a retirement account is the exact reason why you should put Bitcoin into a retirement account. Bitcoin is a volatile asset, but not a risky one. A solid Bitcoin investment requires the one thing that a retirement account has an abundance of: time.