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Comment by vntok | Hacker News Reader

> How can you make an honest ROI if you don't have income?

This seems like a very curious view of the world to me. Do you believe that people who buy houses and sell them at a profit 20 years later are dishonest?

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House price appreciation is a side effect. You can still collect rent. Or have a roof over your head.

You are right, it's just like real estate investment, but using speculative tokens that have no intrinsic value.

It's like you take the housing part out of the housing bubble, and are left with the speculative aspect, the bubble.

At least with cryptocurrency speculation people aren't forced into slums or worse.

If you're an institutional investor in real estate, you can use real estate to generate a nice steady income, via rental. People who aren't parking capital or laundering money tend not to invest in houses to keep them empty.

I think the OP meant speculative. Most jobs create value, some don't. Some people just have a hard time digesting and wrapping their heads around making money without creating actual value.

It's certainly worth interrogating how a physical asset with real depreciation and maintenance costs goes up in value over time.

Indeed - in isolation home price increase tends to match inflation (as in, no real dollar returns). In areas where it goes up, it tends to be due to external influences such as city councils preventing new development.

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