Bitcoin. A Smart Investment?
Many early adopters of Bitcoin have gotten insanely rich overnight. Is it too late to jump on the gravy train? Is it a bubble? Is it safe? Let’s look at these common questions and try to find some sensible answers.
What the heck happened while we were sleeping?
We live in a fast paced world. Google just celebrated its 16th birthday the other day. Still a teenager and already an omnipresent, omniscient tech giant sitting on a mountain of cash. And it was conceived as a computer science project by university students. You might have been too young to play any significant part in the initial wave of tech revolution and the only way you can partake in all the excitement of smart kids taking over the world is by using Gmail, Facebook or your iPhone. But did you think it’s all over and we’re done with inventing, disrupting and revolutionising?
Hell no.
The next big things are happening while mortgage-paying, TV-trusting model citizens are asleep in the safety of their borrowed homes. The next big things are here and now and it takes some courage (and brains) to embrace them early and benefit wildly from their upcoming widespread adoption. And yes, one of the biggest next big things is — Bitcoin.
If you are very new to the whole Bitcoin story, get familiar with the basics first by reading our quick and simple intro to Bitcoin.
Frog turns prince in under a year
I remember my first time being curious about Bitcoin. It was sometime in 2013. I had heard of it numerous times before, while it was still worth $0–10 and never really knew exactly what it was, but I was content enough with discarding it as “some digital currency no one cares about except a few nerds”.
So in 2013, when bitcoin’s worth was still less than $100, I decided to dig more into it and give it a second look. It looked like a very promising concept but I was repelled by the overall lack of taste, which, for me, is a strong trust breaker. I mean, who in their right mind entrusts their money to a company named Mt. Gox, whose website, logo and overall visual ID looks like a russian pirate/gambling/porn portal? It was, at the time, the largest bitcoin exchange which crashed infamously, leaving behind thousands of teeth gnashing customers who may never see their money again. You can hate me for being so smart-ass correct about them after the fact but, for what it’s worth, I didn’t go into Bitcoin at that time partly thanks to them and the way they looked.
But here we are in 2014 and I, the long time Bitcoin sceptic, am no less than an editor of a magazine dedicated to Bitcoin. How did this happen?
Well, in 2014 all things Bitcoin started looking way more professional and a flood of VC investments made it all go through the roof in terms of trustworthiness and potential for widespread adoption. Coinbase got over $30M, similar amount went into Bitpay, then Circle, BitFury, OKCoin and Xapo, each received between 10 and 20 million. Large corporates such as Expedia, Paypal, Dell, DISH, Overstock are among the many companies to officially support Bitcoin. ATM machines for Bitcoin are popping up like mushrooms all over the world. A whole bunch of new great people joined the community, each beautifully contributing in their own unique ways to improve the face of Bitcoin. It’s a vibrant young industry and it’s growing stronger by the minute. And as for worth of bitcoin, it’s now up to around $400. Do I hear the word exponential?
Is it too late now?
If you trust your government and their TV, investing in Bitcoin is not recommended. It’s highly volatile. It’s unregulated. It can disrupt our beloved banking establishment and its hundreds of years old money transfer systems. If you asked those same sources about the Internet at the beginning of 1990's they would tell you it’s a temporary craze that will not last more than a few years, plus it’s a minefield of dangers.
If you try to look at it with eyes of an entrepreneur, however, Bitcoin seems so smart, so elegant, so logical next step in digitalisation of our world, that it’s virtually impossible for it not to succeed. If you don’t buy in now at $400, you can buy in next year at $x,000 or in a few years at $xx,000. One thing is for sure though — those people who spent mere $300 to buy 1,000 bitcoins in 2011 at $0.30 now have $400,000. Not too shabby.
But let’s make one thing clear. Convincing you to buy some bitcoin and keep it stashed in hopes of getting rich is not what I’m after. What I would really be happy to achieve is to entice you to really dive deeper into this amazing story in the making and see what you can creatively do to make it grow in the best possible way. What is your unique idea based on groundbreaking Bitcoin technology that can become the next Paypal, the next Square, the next [YourBrandHere]?
This is the most exciting thing in Bitcoin at the moment — everything is so new and open and there is a wide fragrant field of opportunity to innovate, reimagine, to create the next version of our payment systems, our economy, our world…
So don’t just sit there waiting for someone else to create or improve this or that — get involved and be the change you want to see! And if you ask if it’s too late, this thing has just begun! There is so much to be done and people who do what needs to be done will be the ones to reap the sweetest fruits.
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To learn more about Bitcoin, we recommend these great sources of info, news and analysis: TBI, The Coinsman, Zapchain, CoinDesk.
If you wish to write for BTC Magazine feel free to submit your best article for review.
Cover photo credit: Lumina Images
