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Almost certainly both true that people who invested in bitcoin 2016 or earlier made money and that most people who invested in bitcoin lost money. The most pessimistic numbers I’ve found has the number of bitcoin wallets 10X’d since 2016. And while there isn’t a one to one relationship between wallets and users, I’m sure people who only used exchanges instead of their own wallets in recent bull runs more than make up the difference there.

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Agreed entirely. My point was that to emphasize that there can be reasonable value-investment cases in these odd asset classes.

The maxims of "price is what you pay, value is what you get" and "are you willing to buy this if the market were to stay closed for five years after the purchase?" have felt very helpful in guiding my decision-making.

It's pretty hard to estimate the number of users from just on-chain data, since change from a transaction usually goes to a fresh address. That makes every single transaction appear to create a fresh "wallet".

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