Hard assets and things with finite supply. Anything real. Gold, bitcoin, small cap value stocks, commodities, treasuries (if you think the government won't fail).
It was in the context of the argument. What's more real about Bitcoin than bonds, options, or stock?
It felt like "real" referred to the physical: gold, food, energy, minerals, real physical things that people have a constant demand for.
It was funny to spot the odd entry, where bitcoins are fully digital and have a very socially dependent agreement and entire digital infrastructure required to keep them functioning.
Gold has a bit of a social agreement as well, but it's social agreement dates thousands of years and even if it broke away still has value as a physical material.
If the Internet goes away, Bitcoin goes away. That's a real threat in a bunch of conceivable societal failure scenarios. If you want something real, you want something that will survive the loss of the internet. Admittedly, what you probably want most in those scenarios is diesel, vehicles that run on diesel, and salt. But a pile of gold still could be traded for some of those.
Everyone always talk like societal collapse is global. Take a small pile of gold and use it to buy a plane ticket somewhere stable with internet and your bitcoin will be there waiting for you.
It only requires a code change. Sure you need 50% of the network as well to run the new code, but that's already starting to heavily concentrate, and it only take that majority to agree that more needs to be printed.
But in any case, if OP meant deflationary, I don't think "real" is a good synonym.
