IF YOU BOUGHT $5 OF BITCOIN 7 YEARS AGO, YOU’D BE $4.4 MILLION RICHER
Ever had a case where you wished you had bought something in the past that eventually went up significantly in value? Perhaps a plot in a low-value district which is now worth ten times more? Does that ring a bell? With so many amazing stories surfacing like Kristoffer Koch, Erik Finman, and Jay Smith*, it seems the enormous rise of Bitcoin has been officially making ordinary people who invested in Bitcoin into millionaires.
Monday marked the seventh anniversary of what is said to be the first recorded instance of Bitcoins being used in a real-world transaction. Over the course of seven years, Bitcoin's value has multiplied 879,999 times. If an investor had decided to spend five dollars on about 2,000 Bitcoins back then, that stake would be worth $4.4 million today. With $1,200 spent on some 480,000 Bitcoins, the investor would be worth at least $1.1 billion today.
Bloomberg interview with Bill Gates. “Bitcoin is the answer.”
At first, Bitcoin didn’t really catch on, and it was solely the domain of the early adopters. There were very few businesses which accepted Bitcoin as a payment method, and it was something which was almost frowned upon by most governments. As more and more businesses and governments accepted Bitcoin, it gradually went up in value, more and more people were starting to embrace the idea of a decentralized currency, and as more people jumped on board, the price began to rise. Since the beginning of the year 2017, the value of Bitcoin spiked after gaining legitimacy in countries like Japan.
“Bitcoin is better than currency.” - Bill Gates
The main advantage of Bitcoin is that it is decentralized – meaning, there’s no central bank or government which controls it. This freedom is one of the reasons why Investors have come to see the currency as something of a safe-haven-asset in a problematic geopolitical world — and there's been plenty of that in recent months in Europe, Russia, Brazil and the United States. There is also an additional advantage in Bitcoin – there is a mathematical limitation to the number of Bitcoins that can be created, which means – no printing money, so the rules of economy work perfectly. Where there is a limited supply of something, and the demand goes up, the price goes up along with it.
Wences Casares has been called Bitcoin’s “patient zero” by the Silicon Valley elite. He got Bill Gates, Reid Hoffman, and countless other luminaries into Bitcoin at gatherings of the rich and famous such as Sun Valley.
Billionaire businessman Wences Casares says it’s not too late for people interested in Bitcoin.
The Argentinian-born Casares has founded an internet service provider, a video game company, and a bank, plus he sits on the board of PayPal, but it’s Bitcoin that Casares says he’s dedicating the rest of his life to, and he now runs a startup called Xapo that stores Bitcoin. At a dinner organized by the cryptocurrency policy group Coin Center in New York last night, Casares delivered the keynote speech, including some advice about how to get into Bitcoin.
The formula, according to Casares? Take 1% or less of what you own, invest in Bitcoin with it. “You either lose one percent of your net worth, which most people can take, or you make millions.” he told a room of cryptocurrency advocates at the Westin in Times Square.
Experts such as Wence Casares predict a single Bitcoin will be worth $500,000 by the year 2030.
Casares pegs the odds of Bitcoin failing completely and going to zero dollars at 20%. “If it fails, it will be worthless,” he says. “If it succeeds, in five to seven years a single Bitcoin will be worth more than a million dollars.” He puts the chances of success at greater than 50%.
Casares has an interesting reply for those people who believe they have already “missed out” on the Bitcoin train and are afraid that they are joining too late. He said even those who bought Bitcoin at high prices as recently as a month ago have done “spectacularly well”.
But it’s not just Bitcoin making the headlines, the crypto-currency market is spearheaded by another crypto-currency called “Ethereum” and if you haven’t heard this name yet hear this: Its price grew over 5400% in the last 6 months alone. In fact, the price of Ethereum grew from $7 in the beginning of 2017 to a high of over $400 in June 2017, and there are very good reasons for it. While Bitcoin is mostly used for consumer payment transactions, Ethereum has been adopted by the corporate world. In fact, Ethereum has already been embraced by companies such as Microsoft, Intel, Toyota, J.P Morgan, as well as many other companies which are all official members of The Ethereum Enterprise Alliance (EEA). This corporate acceptance adds a lot to the legitimacy of Ethereum as a currency, and also makes it the perfect “companion” to your crypto-currency investment portfolio.