Ten years ago, I put my down payment money into Bitcoin instead of real estate. It's up about 1000X. Bitcoin's price continues to grow at a very rapid rate, long term average. You see, there were good reasons for Bitcoin's rapid rise. Most of those reasons still exist. In fact, today there are even more good reasons than there were 10 or 5 years ago. It is reasonable to expect the long term average growth rate of Bitcoin to stay very high for the foreseeable future.

Real estate has significant holding costs (eg: taxes, maintenance, insurance, sometimes fees, interest). Real estate isn't very liquid, and it has extremely high transaction costs.

Ultimately, the price of real estate (and rents) is limited by incomes. For example, in the long run people can't pay more for mort./rent than they earn. Realistically, they might be able to afford 35 or 40 percent of their net income for "a place to live". Thus, real estate prices are limited by incomes, in the long run. Incomes tend to barely keep up with inflation.

Looking at long term historical data, such as Case-Shiller, for popular real estate markets, we see, in fact, that real estate prices barely track the rate of inflation, especially when the significant holding costs are properly accounted for.

Bitcoin has no such limit. Bitcoin has no holding costs. Bitcoin is liquid. Bitcoin transactions are typically very little. Bitcoin's price has been more than doubling every year, long term average, and as mentioned before, can reasonably be expected to continues its rapid ascent.

Real estate is currently in a bubble, as evidenced by the price-to-income ratios. The current bubble will pop, as the prior bubble eventually had to pop.

Real estate is nailed down. Bitcoin can be taken with you to anywhere in the world. Real estate is a sitting duck for higher taxes. Real estate can be confiscated.

When the private keys are properly stored, Bitcoin cannot be confiscated.

Knowing all this, a person would be a total idiot to purchase real estate instead of investing in Bitcoin.

Having said that, I do plan on eventually using a small fraction (about 10 or 15 percent) of my Bitcoin holdings to buy my dream home - and to pay for it with Bitcoin, but still end up sitting on a serious stack of sats.

I have zero regrets for investing in Bitcoin instead of real estate, and I never will.