This depends on what people mean when they say “Bitcoin is dumb”. Cryptocurrency as a speculative asset, regardless of whether it’s driven by the flocking of the everyman, is clearly capable of producing personal wealth the same way every other highly volatile speculative asset can. But usually people hawking cryptocurrency are talking about other applications than that, and those are almost always unrealized or just straight up scams.
Bitcoin is a negative-sum game. You can only get out what others put in and miners continuously have to pay for electricity and chips to keep the game going.
It is also a dump speculative asset. I'd even claim Tesla stock is better as speculative asset, at least it may be a positive-sum game.
Maybe seeing you’re argument as a template will have you recognize the weakness of your argument:
{{currency}} is a negative-sum game. You can only get out what others put in and {{entities}} continuously have to {{maintain infrastructure}}.
An actual argument could be derived from the last point by asking whether the cost of maintaining the infrastructure is worth it. This is something the market decides.
1. in terms of "proof", eg. "asset performance", it's proven its more capable
2. crypto as a whole is the riskiest investment on the market
3. speculative assets in general or in highly-notable abundance rn are performing abnormally well, better than assets have performed in the past by a few metrics, as though they're trying to compete or hopefully catch up with the anomaly of bitcoin's growth
