The trillion-dollar club. Terms such as “fringe”, “alternative”, and “experimental” tend to no longer apply when the assets they used to describe reach trillion-dollar valuations. The stratospheric rise in the prices of Bitcoin and other alternative currencies have left traditional investors scratching their heads; some indignant at the fact that a group of ragtag idealists have been minted multimillionaires overnight, while others more receptive of monetary transition are left wondering if they had already missed the boat. No matter which camp one finds themselves, it is now nearly impossible to avoid talking about Bitcoin when approaching the topic of investing.
Before we deconstruct, we define. Bitcoin is just one of the many digital “assets” assembled under the umbrella term known as cryptocurrency. Cryptocurrencies are decentralised; operating under peer-to-peer networking systems without the need for a central authority such as a government, central bank, or organisation to make executive decisions. The asset is a digital token which exists on a shared ledger known as a blockchain, where individual transactions are publicly available while individual identities are masked behind a public key – a random string of alphanumeric cryptographic code that functions like an “email address” in sending/ receiving cryptocurrency.
Bitcoin’s prominence and longevity are owed in part to robustness in its conceptual proof-of-work, where its existing blockchain has had the longest history in resisting fraud, hacking, and other forms of risks that serve to undermine its legitimacy. The “Lindy effect” is exemplified here with Bitcoin – a concept which states that the longer something has survived, the longer it is likely to also survive in the future.
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