It’s different because in this case, there’s an inflow of money that’s not from pure investing, that’s not poured into the system in exchange of a hope for future returns. A customer is not a greater fool expecting to resell the product they just bought for a higher price. To be clear, by greater fool I’m referring to Greater fool theory - Wikipedia, it’s not simply someone paying for something.
If I create a company using my own 10kCHF, and I manage to grow this company, get clients who buy my product, the company is more valuable because of this cashflow. Even assuming I only sell the company for parts and only get back my initial 10kCHF, along the way I’d have gotten a salary out of the sold products, so the company itself would have created value. I would have captured some of the value, while the customer would have captured the other part by getting a product they thought was worth the money without expecting to flip it for more money later.
Now if instead I create a company with 10kCHF but this company does nothing, and I just keep paying some fees to keep it running, my investment decreases in value. Once I close it, I’ll get back less than my initial 10k, while having paid fees that didn’t generate any cashflow.
The fees are the reason why BTC is not zero-sum for the pool of BTC investors, it’s negative-sum, meaning that if you sum all the money that investors got out and in of BTC, you end up with less than 0. Of course that doesn’t mean that some investors won’t still end up with profits.
Edit: I just reread the “Top replies” and realized that the greater fool theory and most of this reasoning has already been mentioned and explained several times already, so unfortunately I don’t think I’m adding much, sorry for the noise! Some posters have explained all that better than me, so I’d suggest to reread their posts.
I think it’d be helpful if you added a link to your source. I’m wondering which definition they use for “realized”, as I doubt for instance that they have stats about when investors realize (i.e. through selling their BTC) their gains and losses.
. But the goal at the end is try to sell high to buy more BTC later.
