The launching of Bitcoin futures on December 10th, which for the first time enables investors to enter the Bitcoin market via a significant regulated US market, implies that we are just getting started. What makes Bitcoin so precious is That there is a finite amount in life. There will only ever be a maximum of 21 million Bitcoins and unlike ordinary fiat monies you cannot just print more of these whenever you feel like. This is because Bitcoin runs on a proof of work protocol: to be able to make it, you must mine it with computer processing power to solve complicated calculations on the Bitcoin blockchain. When this is achieved, you are rewarded with Bitcoin as payment for the job you have done. Regrettably the reward you get for mining has decreased drastically almost annually because Bitcoin’s beginning, meaning that for most people the only viable means to get Bitcoin is purchasing it on a market.

Many consider Bitcoin is simply a bubble. I talked to cryptocurrency specialist and long term investor Duke Randal who believes the asset is overvalued, I’d compare this to many supply and demand bubbles over history such as Dutch Tulip Mania and the dot com bubble of the late 90s. Rates are only speculation based, and when you look at funperformance as a real currency it is almost embarrassing. For people who don’t understand, the dot com bubble was a period between 1997-2001 where many internet businesses were set and given outrageously optimistic valuations based only on speculation which later plummeted 80-90percent as the bubble started to collapse in the early 2000s. Some companies like eBay and Amazon, recovered and sit above those valuations but for others it was the end of the line.

Bitcoin was originally created in Order to take power away from our financial systems and put people in charge of their own money, cutting out the middle man and allowing peer to peer transactions. Untraceable solitude coin Monaro makes trades even faster, boasting an average block period of just two minutes, a fifth of the time Bitcoin can do it and that is without anonymity.  So, I asked Duke Randal exactly the identical question. It all goes back to the exact same supply and demand economics, comparatively there isn’t too much Bitcoin accessible and its recent surge in cost has attracted lots of media attention, this combined with the launching of Bitcoin stocks that many view as the first sign Bitcoin has been accepted by the mass market, has led to plenty of folks jumping on the bandwagon for monetary gain. Like any asset, whenever there is a greater need to buy than to sell, the cost goes up. That is bad because these new investors are entering the market without understanding blockchain and the underlying principles of those currencies meaning they are most likely to get burnt.