Bitcoin has turned out to not be an investment. It's a trading vehicle. Trading over time isn't profitable for most people.
The cliche that volatility is Bitcoin's greatest gift as an asset says as much. Volatility is a gift for trading only. If you can't just buy and hold, it's not an investment.
In modern times (not the early BTC days) BTC doesn't outperform QQQ. You can make it do so with cherry picking the dates.
The bottom and the top is usually a short period. If you go all in at the bottom and sell everything at the top, you can still do well.
How many people do that or can even do that?
Are most BTC holders on this forum "rich" due to Bitcoin? I'm guessing most are not.
If you can buy in the top half of the top year of the cycle, when most people do, and then 4 years later you haven't even beat QQQ, then the risk/reward isn't there as an investment.
Every investment goes down sometimes but stocks have earnings and there are reason for the turnarounds. Bitcoin just relies on Michael Saylor, "believers", constant emotional support to create demand. That's not sustainable.
A mix of gold and QQQ will continue, IMO, to outperform BTC into the future and for logical reasons.
Some say BTC is now "too big to fail". It's not. Anything large can fail if the government doesn't bail it out. It's not going to bail out BTC and therefore it isn't too big to fail.
You could argue that over the last 4 years, BTC made it to center stage. It had the chance to perform and succeed or to underperform. It underperformed.
QQQ beat it, gold beat it, it had no run off top pricing but it still had the crash pricing. That's not an investment with a reasonable risk/reward tradeoff.
All BTC has is volatility and "belief". High belief and prices soar, low belief and they crash. Trade it if you can.
HODL isn't going to work out well for BTC. As it becomes more mainstream there will be less economically uninformed "believers" and it will be assessed rationally and rationally it's not a good investment.
If you live in the US, think the system is going to crash and that it will be great somewhere else...maybe BTC is for you. Otherwise, not so much.
BTC is for trading but not for investing. That's the hard truth.