Ah, and there was another friend who wanted to buy BTC from me. I wanted to sell him some, but my wife strictly vetoed it.
"We're not selling until Bitcoin reaches $30-$40, I don't care if it's just a small amount".
Seems your wife is even more a believer then - I have been granted permission to sell some at 15$
back on topic:
If (and that's a big if) Bitcoin one day becomes huge (say 1% of the world's economy), 1 Bitcoin will be worth somewhere in the neighborhood of $100,000 to $10,000,000.
I'm not really able to quantify the chance that the above scenario will happen, but I argue it's more than zero, and even more than 0.0001.
So, by my (biased) opinion, "every rational person" should spring $5 today and buy 1BTC, because the downside if he lost his entire investment is minimal.
While I can relate to your line of thought, I think one reason is that Bitcoin is relatively hard to understand for somebody unfamiliar with crypto, P2P, monetary systems, etc. Even if you explain the concept to them, they pretty much only have your word for it. You might just as well advocate some random startup or penny stock.
To do a rational risk assessment of an investment in Bitcoin requires quite a lot of research and that's an effort many people (however rational) are not willing to make.
According to Rick Falkvinge, it takes about 10 years for a new technology to really reach the masses. He stated that it was about the same time it needed for blogging, Internet video and Wikipedia. I remember vividly when people were laughing about the concept of Wikipedia... Times are changing - often not as fast as one could wish, but Bitcoin is definitely here to stay. I for one am looking forward to 2019
