Is it right time to buy bitcoin today

is it right time to buy bitcoin today

Similar to any speculative investment, buying Bitcoin obviously carries be doing great now in 2021, holding for years at a time is not a. That's the best thing you can do.” Just like you shouldn't let a price drop influence your decision to buy crypto, don't let a sudden price increase alter. While buying cryptocurrency is a major trend right now, it's a volatile and risky investment choice. We'll show you how it works.

Is it right time to buy bitcoin today - scandal!

Jordan Tuwiner Last updated February 14, 2022

investing in bitcoin

Thinking of investing in Bitcoin or digital currency?

This post will outline some things you NEED to know before you buy.

We’re going to explain:

  • The basics of investing in bitcoin
  • Why it needs to be taken seriously as an asset class
  • How to buy bitcoins (with credit card or bank account)
  • How to protect and properly secure your bitcoins in a digital wallet

What is a Bitcoin Investment?

A Bitcoin investment is exactly what it sounds like - using dollars or euros or any other fiat currency and buying Bitcoin with them. It may also mean using retirement funds from a 401k or other funds to invest in a qualified Bitcoin IRA.

How to Invest in Bitcoin

  • Popular Exchanges

  • bits of gold logo

    Bits of Gold

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    • Crypto exchange based in Tel Aviv
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    • Crypto exchange based in India
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    CoinSpot

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    • iOS & Android apps that let you trade
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    • Australian crypto exchange established in 2013
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    eToro

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    Fees

    Varies by crypto/spread

    Account Minimum

    Starts from $50

    • Start trading fast; high limits
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    Bitpanda

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    Coinbase

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    Bitbuy

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    CoinSmart

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    Netcoins

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    Cryptoasset investing is unregulated in some EU countries and the UK. No consumer protection. Your capital is at risk.

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How to invest in Bitcoin will depend on what country you live in. Developed countries have more options and more liquidity.

Coinbase is the world’s largest bitcoin broker and available in the United States, UK, Canada, Singapore, and most of Europe.

coinbase home page

Coinbase's home page

But, you can use our crypto exchange finder to find a place to purchase bitcoin in your country.

Find a Bitcoin Exchange

Is Bitcoin Safe?

In some ways, buying Bitcoin is much like buying any other currency. You always need to be mindful that its price rises and falls compared to other currencies.

One way Bitcoin is different than traditional investments is that you either need to hold the coins yourself or trust a third party to do it.

Holding them yourself means there is the risk that if you don’t store them properly you could lose them forever.

If you let a third party hold them for you, they may get hacked. And unlike storing dollars or stocks, once the coins are hacked, they cannot be easily replaced.

binance hacked for $40M

For instance, if someone robs a bank, the US government will make that bank whole through something called the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (or FDIC). There is no risk to you, as the bank customer, of having your funds stolen.

But Bitcoin is different. Bitcoin are inherently limited in supply (only 21 million will ever exist). So it isn’t so easy to replace them. Once they are gone, they are usually gone for good.

If the institution holding your Bitcoins gets hacked, they may cover the loss because they can afford to and its good for business, as Binance did in 2019.

binance pays back $40M

Keep in mind, though, there is no legal obligation for them to do so.

There is an advantage to accepting these risks though.

For one, Bitcoin cannot be artificially inflated like US dollars.

Why is this important?

When your government prints more money, it makes the dollars you have worth less over time.

For instance, you used to buy a soda for $0.10. Now, it costs $1.50.

old coke machine coin input

An old cola machine selling bottles for $0.10

That is because of inflation.

Bitcoin is deflationary, which means the coins become MORE valuable over time, not less. You can buy more with a Bitcoin today than you could a year ago.

So while holding Bitcoin has its own risks, so does holding dollars.

Its up to you to decide which one you trust more.

How to Invest $100 in Bitcoin Today

The best way to invest $100 in Bitcoin today is using a Bitcoin exchange.

These services allow you to make recurring Bitcoin buys on a regular schedule (every week, every month, every day, etc), or one-time purchases.

These services do usually require you to verify your identity, which can take up to a few days.

Just be aware that there are higher fees on credit card purchases!

How Much BTC Does $100 Get You?

In November 2020, the price of bitcoin was around $15,000, so $100 would have purchased .0067 BTC. In January 2022, with the price around $47,000, the same $100 would purchase about .0021 BTC. The price of bitcoin relative to the USD will always affect the amount of BTC you can purchase at any given time.

When is the Best Time to Buy Bitcoin?

As with any market, nothing is for sure.

Anyone’s guess is just about as good as anyone else’s when it comes to predicting near term Bitcoin prices.

Throughout its history, Bitcoin has generally increased in value at a very fast pace, followed by a slow, steady downfall until it stabilizes.

Use tools like our Bitcoin price chart to analyze charts and understand Bitcoin’s price history.

Bitcoin price chart historical

Our Bitcoin Price Chart

Bitcoin is global, and therefore less affected by any single country’s financial situation or stability, good or bad.

For example, speculation about the Chinese Yuan devaluing has, in the past, caused more demand from China, which also pulled up the exchange rate on U.S. and Europe based cryptocurrency exchanges.

We’ve also seen bull markets in Bitcoin in the United States result in large arbitrage events in markets with much less liquidity due to capital controls, such as Korea. In the case of Korea, these were known as the ‘Kimchi Premium’

As Igor Makarov and Antoinette Shoar note in Trading and Arbitrage in Cryptocurrency Markets,

The daily average price ratio between the US and Korea between December 2017 to February 2018 reached 40% for several days...We estimate that during this period a minimum of $2 billion of potential total arbitrage profits were left on the table. In contrast, the price deviations between exchanges in the same country typically do not exceed 1%, on average.

harvard university logoMakarov & Schoar, Economists, Harvard and MIT

Getting Bitcoin into Korea to take advantage of the large premium was incredibly easy. The issue was getting your fiat out of the country after you sold.

Ironically, such controls only fed the Bitcoin price even further, as individuals realized Bitcoin could do what fiat could not: make cross border payments in any amount without permission from any regulatory authority.

All of these examples illustrate how global chaos is generally seen as beneficial to Bitcoin’s price since Bitcoin is apolitical and sits outside the control or influence of any particulate government.

fed announces ample reserves regime

COVID19 was one such example of global Chaos boosting Bitcoin, as the Federal Reserve proclaimed an 'ample reserves regime'.

When thinking about how economics and politics will affect Bitcoin’s price, it’s important to think on a global scale and not just about what’s happening in a single country.

Is Bitcoin Legit?

Yes, Bitcoin is absolutely a legitimate asset. So much so that publicly traded companies such as Microstrategy and Tesla have invested billions of dollars into Bitcoin.

tesla invests into bitcoin

But Tesla isn’t the only big firm catching onto Bitcoin.

In fact, the oldest and largest bank on planet Earth - BNY Mellon - has said they are going to provide custody and exchange integration services into their banking offerings.

BNY Mellon accepts bitcoin

We firmly believe digital assets are here to stay, so that's the future.

michael demissie of BNY MellonMichael Demissie Head of Advanced Solutions, BNY Mellon

And it gets even better.

Nearly every large bank that has ever had anything bad to say about Bitcoin is now stumbling over themselves to offer services to customers who want in.

Here are some of the biggest changes in position from major financial firms over the years:

banks reverse decision on bitcoin

There are almost no institutions of consequence left who haven’t reversed their opinions on Bitcoin - and they all agree: Bitcoin is legitimate and here to stay.

Here is a global view of how much Bitcoin is owned and held by big public and private institutions as well as governments all over the world:

banks reverse decision on bitcoin

How to Check the Bitcoin Price – How Much Does a Bitcoin Cost?

The best way to check the price of Bitcoin is by using our Bitcoin price page!

On that page, you can see our historical chart.

Historical btc chart

As well as more specific information related to the price for that day.

bitcoin price movements on the day

How Much to Buy in Bitcoin

If you want to invest in Bitcoin, the best strategy for investing and how much to invest will again depend on your needs and lifestyle. Your financial advisor will be the best person to talk to.

That said, some people like to use a strategy called ‘dollar cost averaging’. With this strategy, you buy a little at a time every day, week, or month, etc.

It’s up to you to decide how frequently and in what quantity to buy. The important thing is to keep the dollar amount the same each purchase. This helps to avoid going “all in” at a high price. Ask your financial advisor about this strategy if you are curious. There a tons of services that cater to this strategy, including Swan, and Coinbase

What’s The Difference Investing in Altcoins vs Bitcoins?

The difference between Bitcoin and all other coins is enormous.

Bitcoin has a market cap worth over $1 Trillion. No altcoin–even Litecoin or Ethereum–comes even close to that.

There is also no other crypto asset or altcoin that is as old or established as Bitcoin is.

Altcoins also lack the security and decentralization of Bitcoin, and are therefore much more open to an attack that takes down the entire network.

Our advice is to stay away from altcoins and just focus on Bitcoin.

On a long enough timeline, Bitcoin almost always beats the performance of any altcoin anyway.

Just look at Bitcoin’s dominance index - a measure of how much of the crypto market share is held by Bitcoin:

bitcoin dominance chart

Is Bitcoin Still a Good Investment, Even Above $50,000?

No one knows, and frankly, no one will ever know at any price point. Anyone who tells you know if now is a good price to buy in at is likely scamming you.

Bitcoin is still considered by most to be a risky investment and you should never invest more than you can afford to lose. That being said, high volatility assets do tend to have greater potential for return (matched by its potential for incredible loss). You should always consult a licensed financial planner.

What About Investing in Bitcoin Mining?

The Bitcoin mining industry has grown at a rapid pace.

Mining, which could once be done on the average home computer is now only done profitably using specialized data centers and hardware (known as ‘ASIC’s’).

The latest round of Bitcoin hardware—dedicated ASICs—has co-evolved with datacenter design, and now most computation is performed in specialized ASIC datacenters....

These datacenters are warehouses, filled with computers built for the sole purpose of mining Bitcoin. Today, it costs millions of dollars to even start a profitable mining operation.

bitcoin mining farm

A view from inside a very organized mining farm

Bitcoin miners are no longer a profitable investment for new Bitcoin users, even despite rising transaction fees.

If you want a small miner to play around with mining, go for it. But don’t treat your home mining operation as an investment or expect to get a return.

There may be one exception to this rule: investing money into a co-location style mining facility that allows you to buy the hardware and they handle the maintenance of that hardware. They also negotiate with energy companies to get a good price on electricity.

A good example of such a company would be Compass Mining or Blockstream mining.

Bitcoin Interest Schemes

If someone asks you to invest in Bitcoin interest schemes, be careful.

As of now, Blockfi (based in New York) and Gemini trading platform are some of the only legit ways for retail investors to earn interest on bitcoin and crypto.

What About Using PayPal and Robinhood?

As of now, these two companies do not allow you to withdrawal your bitcoins. This means they control your coins, and not you.

Bitcoin ETFs

Currently, the closest thing to a Bitcoin ETF is the Grayscale Bitcoin Trust (GBTC). This is the only way to buy bitcoin in your standard stock market brokerage account, though that may change soon:

Bitcoin Mining

Conclusion

Investing in Bitcoin comes with outsized risk compared with traditional assets.

But with that risk comes the opportunity for outsized reward.

Like all major financial decisions, you should consult with your financial planner before investing in Bitcoin. If and when you are ready to make your first purchase, this guide and the rest of BuyBitcoinWorldwide should put you on the right path.

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Digital currencies are continuing to make headlines. Berkshire Hathaway, the company of star investor Warren Buffett, has bought $1 billion worth of stock in a digital bank focusing on cryptocurrencies.

However, regulators and central banks remain concerned. The price of bitcoin plunged to $34,000 in February from $69,000 in November. It is now around $39,000. So should you join the hype or run a mile?

In this article we explain:

Related content: Is cryptocurrency a good investment?

This article contains affiliate links that can earn us revenue.*

What is bitcoin and how does it work?

The concept of digital money that you use online is not that complicated in itself. After all, most of us will be familiar with transferring money from one online bank account to another.

Cryptocurrencies like bitcoin are digital assets that operate like normal currency, but with notable differences. They use peer to peer payment methods, without the banks taking a cut with every transaction. There are no physical versions of the coins either.

Each bitcoin is created (or mined) using an encrypted code, which is a string of numbers and letters. The same equation used to create the code is can “unlock” it (like a virtual key).

Other important points about bitcoin:

  • Cryptocurrencies, like bitcoin, ethereum and cardano, are a form of payment that uses blockchain technology to send data in cyberspace
  • Each bitcoin must be mined
  • It is finite: only 21 million bitcoins that can be mined in total
  • Cryptocurrencies are “decentralised” meaning they are not regulated by a financial authority, like a government or central banks
  • Most platforms will allow bitcoin purchases using credit cards (bear in mind that your credit card provider will probably charge you a fee to do this)

Why has bitcoin dropped?

The price of bitcoin and several other leading cryptocurrencies suffered huge falls in December 2021 and prices have been on a downward trajectory so far in 2022.

The Fed’s January meeting to decide whether to raise interest rates saw crypto fall along with other stocks and shares.

The bitcoin price is around $35,000, as of 24 February, according to data from Coinbase*. That’s a long way from the all-time high of $69,000 seen in November.

The recent turmoil has been caused by:

  • Uncertainty around rising interest rates in the US and UK, causing a sell-off in risky assets
  • China making cryptocurrency transactions illegal
  • Suggestions that Russia could ban cryptocurrency trading and mining, causing prices to plummet

There have also been threats of further regulation for cryptocurrency investments in the future.

Should I invest in bitcoin?

Bitcoin is extremely volatile. If you are willing to take the risk, first make sure you understand what you are investing in and have a crypto investment strategy.

Also make sure you aren’t investing simply because you have a fear of missing out. There are a number of questions you should ask yourself before getting involved:

  1. Do I understand what I am investing in and how bitcoin and the crypto market work?
  2. Am I happy with the level of risk?
  3. How much more expensive is it now compared to a few months ago? If so, why am I wanting to buy a thing because its price is higher? Where else in my life do I do that?
  4. Is there any evidence to suggest prices could rise even higher?
  5. If I buy it now with a view to sell it for even more later, who do I think will buy it from me for that higher price and why?
  6. If an asset is so great, why was I not interested when it was much cheaper?
  7. Have I convinced myself that I am in some way “in the know?”

If you don’t have answers to these questions, it’s probably not a good idea to invest. If you do buy bitcoin, make sure you aren’t putting money you need on the line. Read more about cryptocurrency tips (and mistakes to avoid).

If you are new to investing and want to know more about the general principles and how to get started, check out our guide here.

Like any investment, cryptocurrency comes with risks and potential rewards. Compared to traditional types of investments, cryptocurrency is particularly risky.

Here are some things to think about before you invest:

  1. We definitely don’t recommend investing all your life savings on cryptocurrency markets
  2. It’s best to see it a bit like gambling so only invest small amount of your disposable income and be prepared to lose the lot
  3. Never invest more than you can afford to lose
  4. If you haven’t got much money left at the end of each month, it’s best to steer clear of crypto and focus on saving your money instead
  5. Like traditional assets, it’s best to treat cryptocurrency as a long-term investment to give you the best chance of making money
  6. Cryptocurrencies are extremely volatile, subject to bull runs and market crashes

The ups and downs of bitcoin

It is hailed by fans as a market-disrupting liberation and demonised by many personal finance experts as a dangerous creation. One things for sure is that bitcoin is volatile. 

Since December 2020, bitcoin has enjoyed a theatre of dramatic ups and downs. We outline some of these here: is a bitcoin crash coming?

The problem is that the price of cryptocurrencies is not underpinned by any intrinsic value. It is determined by one thing: confidence, says Mark Northway, investment manager at Sparrows Capital.

So if you decide to invest, be prepared for a bumpy ride.

Can you lose all your money in bitcoin?

Yes you certainly can. Crypto is very risky and not like conventional investing in the stock market.

Bitcoin’s value is based purely on speculation. This is different to company stocks where the share price will move depending on how the business is performing.

Important: cryptocurrencies are unregulated by the UK watchdog, the Financial Conduct Authority. Crypto platforms are only regulated for anti-money laundering purposes.

There are three main ways to lose all you money with bitcoin:

  • The value plummetsand you sell: crypto is volatile with its price determined by sentiment. Though technically you only lose money if you sell an investment for less than you bought it for. This is known as “crystallising your losses”.
  • Your memory: experts estimate 20 per cent of all cryptocurrency has either been forgotten about or lost with a current value of around $140billion, according to Crypto data firm Chainalysis
  • Cyber crime: hackers and scammers are thought to steal around $10million worth of cryptocurrency every day, according to Atlas VPN

Some people choose to take their holdings offline and store it in a physical device called a cold wallet, otherwise known as a hardware wallet or cold storage that is similar to a USB stick. While this protects from online attacks you risk losing your holdings.

As with any investment, do your due diligence and don’t pin all your hopes on one company or one cryptocurrency.

Spread your money around so you spread the risk and only invest what you can afford to lose.

This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is matt-bowden-GZc4fnQsaWQ-unsplash-edited.jpg

How to make money by investing in bitcoin

Like any investment, making money depends on what price you buy and sell an asset for. If you sell when its price is higher than you bought it for, you will make money.

If you sell for a lower price than you bought it for, you will lose money.

For example, if you had invested in bitcoin at the start of:

  • 2020 and sold on 31 December 2020, you would have made a 300% profit
  • 2018 and sold on 31 December 2018, you would have made a 73% loss

Bitcoin is extremely volatile so the trick is not to panic and crystallise your losses by selling when its value inevitably falls. This is the same with all investments.

Bitcoin price graph

Ways to invest in bitcoin

Buying the coins (or unit of a coin) on a cryptocurrency exchange is the most common way of investing in bitcoin.

But there are other options:

Buy shares in bitcoin-related companies

You could invest in cryptocurrency exchanges or even buy shares in companies that are accepting bitcoin as payment.

Bitcoin ETFs

You could invest in a bitcoin exchange traded fund ETF. This copies the price of the digital currency, allowing you to buy into the fund without actually trading bitcoin itself.

Invest in blockchain technology companies

You could invest in the blockchain network (the system for recording information about crypto). For example, tech platform Solana claims to be the fastest blockchain in the world.

Bitcoin funds

Several investment companies are launching bitcoin funds.

It will still be volatile, but it could be easier to sell your investment and get your money back than investing directly. 

There are also funds that have some exposure to bitcoin as well as traditional assets like shares and bonds.

Bitcoin options

These are a form of financial derivative that gives you the right to buy or sell bitcoin at a set price (known as a strike price) before a certain date of expiry.

Unlike buying bitcoin cryptocurrency outright, bitcoin options enable you to take a speculative position (up or down) on the future direction of a market price.

You would buy a call option if you believe the market price would increase:

  • If your prediction was correct and the market price increased above the bitcoin option’s strike price, you’d be able to buy bitcoin at the pre-specified price. How far the bitcoin price rose past the strike price determines how much profit you’d make.
  • If your prediction was wrong and the price of bitcoin fell, you could let the options contract expire and only lose the premium you paid to open the trade.

Read aboutLewis, who taught himself about cryptocurrency and made £8,500 in less than a year after setting up an account with trading platform eToro.

Is bitcoin bad for the environment?

The digital currency uses as much power as the Netherlands every year, with just 30 countries using more energy, according to researchers from the University of Cambridge.

Computers that mine bitcoin use up to 1% of the world’s electricity supply.

While some of bitcoin’s consumption is renewable (an estimated 39%), fossil fuels are still being used to power the mining and servicing of the digital currency.

This is why electric car manufacturer Tesla has stopped accepting crypto payments, causing bitcoin to fall. Find out more in our Guide to eco-friendly cryptocurrencies.

What are the fees when buying bitcoin?

If you want to buy and sell bitcoin, there are usually fees to pay, such as:

  • Transaction fees
  • Deposit fees
  • Withdrawal fees
  • Trading fees
  • Escrow fees

These usually cost a few percent of the total transaction value.

Do financial institutions support bitcoin?

Governments, regulators and companies are looking closely at bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.

Companies adopting bitcoin include:

Investment companies that are showing an interest include:

  • The world’s largest asset manager, BlackRock, opened two of its funds to the possibility of investing in bitcoin futures
  • UK based Ruffer Investment Management added bitcoin to its multi-asset portfolios before pulling out five months later with a  $1.1B profit
  • In 2020, one of the world’s biggest index providers, S&P Dow Jones Indices announced it would launch indexing services in 2021 for over 550 of the top traded cryptocurrencies.

The Bank of England has been exploring the possibility of its own central bank-backed digital currencies. This has been dubbed as “britcoin”. Other central banks like the Federal Reserve have been doing the same.

As more institutional investors get on board with crypto assets for capital gains, this could help to calm dramatic price moves.

Crypto friendly banks UK

Most of the UK’s major banks now let you move money between a regulated crypto exchange and your bank account.

However, some banks are more cautious than others. For example, Starling Bank had imposed a temporary suspension on outbound faster payments to cryptocurrency exchanges in order to protect customers.

The banks are continually weighing up the risks. Some make it easier for customers to move money to and from crypto exchanges.

What is Binance and can I still use it in the UK?

The UK financial watchdog has blacklisted cryptocurrency exchange Binance and banned it from carrying out any regulated activity over concerns about its money laundering controls.

The regulator has also ordered the company to stop any form of advertising in the UK.

Binance isn’t based in the UK, so the British regulator doesn’t have the power to stop investors from buying and selling cryptocurrency using the exchange. However exchanges do have to register with the FCA to operate in the UK and are monitored for money-laundering.

This is a clear warning that investors should be very cautious.

Why are regulators concerned?

The FCA has also warned investors to be wary about companies that promise high returns from cryptocurrency. The nature of investment means that there is never a guarantee of making money.

In January 2021 the FCA banned the sale of complex derivatives that speculate on cryptocurrency movements.

This means that financial services can’t offer retail customers contracts for difference, spreadbet options, futures and exchange traded notes that focus on digital currencies. 

China’s crypto ban

Trading cryptocurrency in China has been illegal since 2019, in what Beijing says is an attempt to stop money-laundering. People could still trade online however on foreign exchanges.

At the end of September 2021, China’s central bank went a step further by banning bitcoin transactions and basically making cryptocurrency illegal. The central bank warned that cryptocurrency “seriously endangers the safety of people’s assets”, which knocked thousands of dollars off the price of bitcoin.

Banks and payment firms are banned from providing cryptocurrency transaction services. In May 2021, three state-backed organisations announced there would be no protection for consumers if they lost any money from crypto trading.

The following month, banks and payment platforms were told to stop facilitating transactions while bans were issued on crypto “mining”.

Amazon to accept bitcoin as payment?

If the rumours are true, the technology company could accept bitcoin payments sooner rather than later which could drive the price of the cryptocurrency upwards.

This comes after Amazon posted a job advert looking to hire someone to develop its digital currency strategy.

Amazon isn’t the only tech giant to be branching into cryptocurrency; there are rumours circulating that Apple will use some of its large cash reserves to invest in bitcoin.

“Given the huge volatility and that the use case of crypto currencies is far from proven, traders should only dabble with money they can afford to lose.’’

Susannah Streeter
Senior Investment and Markets Analyst, Hargreaves Lansdown

Is there a less risky way of investing in crypto?

“Stablecoins” could be a less risky way of investing in cryptocurrency, according to Gavin Brown, associate professor in financial technology at the University of Liverpool.

Brown points to tether, the largest stablecoin, backed by one dollar per coin. It topped the $50bn mark on 26 April 2021 but he warns that potential investors shouldn’t necessarily see tether as the next big thing.

“In theory it won’t ever be worth more than a dollar. But it’s potentially an interesting option for any varied portfolio and it could be a slice of stability if [other] things start to suffer.”

The stablecoin has not been without controversy either – being fined by the New York Attorney General and banned from the state the year.

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₿ Should You Buy Bitcoin Right Now? – An Expert Opinion

Buy Bitcoin on Coinbase

As Bitcoin continues to have an amazing bull run in 2021, the question on everyone’s mind is whether this is the right time to buy.

“Hey Jean, do you think this is a good time to buy myself some Bitcoin?”

My inbox has been flooded with slight variations of this question, so I wrote this article to help my friends, family, and the general public process this decision and arrive at an informed decision.

I am a strong believer in the long-term future of Bitcoin due to its fundamental properties, which we’ll delve into later in this article. I have therefore been happy to buy at any price point since Bitcoin’s inception, as I think the price has a long way to go still and we’re in the early years of crypto, comparable to watching the dawn of commercial internet usage in the mid to late 90s.

I consider Bitcoin as the best investment of our lifetime, and will do my best to explain why I think so in the rest of this article.


How to Get Started with Bitcoin

I know you might now have time or even sufficient interest to read the rest of this long article, so again, if you’re already convinced about buying, here are my basic recommendations for entering the Bitcoin space.

buy bitcoin from coinbase

In the meantime, if you’re already convinced and you came here looking for the best places to buy Bitcoin right away, here’s what you need to do next:

There are hundreds of places you can buy Bitcoin from, but I would suggest that you stick to the exchanges that have been established for many years and have a perfect security track record. It’s important that these exchanges are regulated where applicable. These are my recommendations:

They are the world’s safest, biggest and most reputable exchanges and you can’t go wrong with them.

I’ve also written a guide on how to buy Bitcoin in Europe where I go into further detail on how you can get your hands on some Bitcoin.

Once you have your Bitcoin, you can purchase a Ledger Nano to store that Bitcoin offline and away from any hackers.

Trade Bitcoin on Binance

If you’re more inclined to trading, you can check out platforms like eToro or Bitfinex.

If you just want to hold your Bitcoin while earning good returns, you can check out some crypto platforms that offer a savings account. My favorites at the moment are BlockFi and YouHodler, but you can learn more about those options here.

Towards the end of the article, I will again discuss some of the ways that you can make money with Bitcoin.


Waiting to Buy the Dip

By far the most frequent follow-up question I get and the biggest block I see people facing, is this:

“What price should I buy at?”

I don’t believe in timing the market on any investment, unless there is a big macro event like the financial crisis of 2007-2008 and the COVID dip of March 2020.

Therefore, for any investment I make, I’m typically looking 5-10 years ahead and thinking about how much value that investment can generate within that timeframe. The whole crypto space is still in its infancy, and Bitcoin has enormous room for growth, thus any price point is a good entry in my opinion.

I think we’ll be seeing many more similar tweets in the coming months and years:

#Bitcoin is $40,400 right now.

You could have bought it for $29,000 last week. Still waiting for the dip?

— Bitcoin Archive 🗄🚀🌔 (@BTC_Archive) February 6, 2021

Unfortunately, people are really attracted to the idea of buying the dip. The problem is that the dip may never come, and if you know people who did buy some dip, it’s likely that they were in a position to buy at an even lower price a few months earlier but didn’t have the courage to pull the trigger. If that’s not the case, in 90% of the cases I would attribute managing to buy a dip to pure luck.

Even in the case of the major macro events like the 2007 crisis and March 2020 dip, to make the most of those events you’d have had to have a lot of spare cash lying around and ready to be invested. Again, mostly, a question of luck.

See also: The Best crypto trading apps and exchanges

However, if you feel uncomfortable about choosing a particular price point to make your entry, consider investing a fixed amount periodically, say every month. In that way, you’ll smooth out any drastic price variances and you’ll be building up your Bitcoin portfolio over time. The disadvantage of that strategy is that Bitcoin might make a sharp move upwards in the meantime.

Ok, with those preliminary recommendations out of the way, let’s proceed with the reasons why I think Bitcoin is the best investment of our generation.


Why am I Bullish on Bitcoin?

Last year, after the March dip, I had written about that being a great time to increase one’s Bitcoin holding, as the market was ruled by fear.

Since then, the price has risen steadily, breaking through its former all-time high in a dramatic way. In 2021, it seems that the bull market is back in full swing.

Before we continue, let me reiterate that nobody can predict Bitcoin’s price, and neither can I. Even if I had some hunch, I would not want you to blindly follow what I say, because I am against getting financial advice online.

However, I use this blog as my own small space to think about things, and writing is how I best formulate my ideas. As an added benefit, I get to interact with other investors and people whose ideas contrast mine, thus helping me further refine my thoughts.

The way I see it now, Bitcoin seems to be following the stock-to-flow model. Proponents of this model had predicted that the price of Bitcoin should reach somewhere between $100k and $200k at some point in 2021 or 2022. This is based on an analysis of the demand and scarcity of this asset, and comparing it to other assets like gold.

Read more: The Best Books about Bitcoin and Crypto

This is a very bullish target price, although it does seem much more realistic now that Bitcoin has broken through $40k. Irrespective of the price swings, I remain very bullish on the Bitcoin network long-term, due to the fundamentals being stronger than ever.

Let’s now consider a few major themes that add to the bullish argument for Bitcoin.

Bitcoin Hoarding

During bull markets, the long term Bitcoin holders hoard the supply in anticipation of a major price increase. As of November 2020, over 62% of the Bitcoin supply hasn’t moved in over one year (all-time-high). This is  a very bullish indicator.

All indications say we’re at the beginning of the next major bull run. Smart money is flooding in, “bad news” doesn’t negatively affect the price, and the existing investor base is hoarding the outstanding supply.etoro buy bitcoin

Bitcoin as a Safe Haven

The US federal reserved printed ungodly amounts of dollars last year and then pumped into traditional financial markets last year to keep them from faltering. The European Union followed suit. It’s quite logical that with more money in the system, the value of your existing stash will lose value as money is less scarce than it was before. Bitcoin on the other hand maintains its hard cap on the total amount that can ever be issued.

Hence we get a chart like this, where fiat currencies unequivocally lose value against hard assets like Bitcoin.

fiat vs bitcoin

Big institutions and corporate entities have understood this very well. In fact, their main play is that of protecting their financial reserves, rather than buying Bitcoin in the hope of exponential growth. They want to protect the store of value they have accumulated over the years, and they know that if they don’t buy a hard asset like Bitcoin that value will be greatly diminished by the effects of money printing and other fiscal policies.

The Great Upcoming Wealth Transfer

Kraken Intelligence, the in-house research team at the crypto exchange of the same name, released a new report entitled “Inheriting USDs & Acquiring BTCs: How ‘The Great Wealth Transfer’ Will Fuel ‘The Great Bitcoin Adoption.’”

According to the report, if American Millennials were to invest at least five percent of their inherited wealth into Bitcoin (BTC), they could drive the price up to $350,000 in 2044. This would effectively give the generational group almost $70 trillion of value from a $971 billion investment.

2/ Assuming a 5% investment allocation and a 2% inheritance tax, by 2044 Gen X and Millennials could invest an estimated $971 billion into #Bitcoin as they inherit wealth.

World investment could make this figure much higher. pic.twitter.com/r0VV97HIgz

— Kraken Exchange (@krakenfx) March 25, 2020

With many older Americans on the verge of retirement, the report suggests those in younger generations who are not only more familiar with but more accepting of Bitcoin will have more options investing in the future.

“…a disproportionate percentage of the Millennials and Gen X will continue to be the driving force of adoption [of cryptocurrency] for the foreseeable future. While this can be explained in part by the fact that both generations harness a greater technological competence than their elders, we should also consider that bitcoin’s current volatility is unsuitable for individuals nearing or in retirement.”

Baby Boomers in the United States currently control approximately 57% of the total wealth, $50 trillion of which will pass to Millennials and Gen Xers in the next two years. This redistribution is referred to as the “Great Wealth Transfer”.

If younger people were to use just 1% of this wealth to then invest in BTC, the price could rise to $70,000 — if not more — in 2044. This is based only on investors in the U.S., meaning the actual numbers could easily be higher.

Bitcoin entering the Fourth Era

According to an analysis by Bitwise Asset Management, Bitcoin is entering its fourth era in which it will go mainstream, and if previous eras are anything to go by, we should be seeing a big run-up to $100,000 or more in the next 2 years.

Network Effects

Crypto, or digital assets, are a highly correlated space. The best coins will always have the softest bear markets, and it is becoming clear that Ethereum wasn’t much worse on the COVID correction and is punching above its weight in the rally. With a network value around 15% of Bitcoin, there is the potential for a catch-up, but its network is smaller on the most important measures.

Crypto valuation is all about the network. While Ethereum processes a large number of transactions, they tend to be small. It won’t catch up unless its network sees a surge in transaction value, which means either many more transactions or to attract a greater share of the larger ones. But this is a youthful space, and anything is possible in crypto.

In the meantime, Bitcoin is heading back to $20 billion of network transfer each week. So long as this goes up, so will the price of Bitcoin.

New Crypto-First Banks

Less than two months after cryptocurrency exchange Kraken secured its Wyoming bank charter to start a crypto bank, a second player did the same.

Startup Crypto Bank Avanti Unanimously Wins Wyoming Bank Charter: Avanti Founder and CEO Caitlin Long, a Wall Street Veteran who used to run Morgan Stanley’s pension advisory group, expects the bank to launch sometime in 2021.

These are very bullish developments for the crypto space in general, as banking has long been a major Achilles heel for crypto investors and businesses. Many of the world’s banks were and still are hesitant about providing services to crypto-related companies, and some even prohibit normal people from transferring fiat currency to exchange accounts or withdrawing them back from exchanges to the banks.

These new banks, and others that are pivoting or changing their previous stance, will now change the scenario and make crypto investing much more accessible, paving the way for many new investors to enter and get their first holdings.

Click here to check out some forward-thinking European banks that are crypto-friendly.

Not only are we seeing new crypto-friendly banks popping up, but even traditional banks are getting in:

  • BNY Mellon, America’s oldest bank, announced its plans for a digital asset custody offering later in 2021. Mike Demissie, head of advanced solutions at BNY Mellon, called custody services the “anchor” of the industry.

  • A $150 billion investment group at Morgan Stanley is considering whether bitcoin is a “suitable option for its investors,” per a Bloomberg report. The investment would require regulatory approval.

  • Deutsche Bank also has plans for cryptocurrency custody and prime brokerage offerings. According to a previously overlooked report from late 2020, the bank is set to develop “a fully integrated custody platform for institutional clients and their digital assets” to connect with “the broader cryptocurrency ecosystem.”

  • JPMorgan co-president Daniel Pinto said his bank “will have to be involved” in bitcoin if it develops into an asset used by different managers and investors. “The demand isn’t there yet, but I’m sure it will be at some point,” Pinto said.

European countries legalizing Bitcoin

As reported by Les Echos, Bitcoin now has the official status of money in France.

Meanwhile, Bitcoin has been qualified as a financial instrument in Germany. Portugal, on the other hand, is well-known as possibly the most crypto-friendly nation in Europe, and does not impose any taxes on crypto gains.

Bitcoin is the result of many previous projects and research

Many people seem to think that Bitcoin is a recent thing, even a bubble, but it can’t be further from the truth. Bitcoin has already been working for more than ten years, while being itself just the latest in a series of projects that tried to achieve the aim of a censorship-resistant and digital money and store of value.

Here’s a chart illustrating how far the Bitcoin prehistory goes:

2020 was a massive year for Crypto

The year 2020 will be one to remember due to the devastating effects on humanity and the economy as a result of COVID and government policies, but crypto just had an amazing year.

We had the DeFi summer and the long-awaited institutional buying of Bitcoin, as well as the launch of the ETH2 beacon chain and many other big events. Here’s an infographic illustrating the major crypto events of 2020:


What the Charts and Indicators Show

Let’s take a look at some charts.

Financial predictive models are a graphical way of displaying different investment thesis, and while some do remain valid long-term, it’s important to keep in mind that they are constructed by looking back at what the price has done in the past, and this might not reflect what it will do in the future, as there are so many factors that might come into play.

However, I still like to follow several models and indicators as I feel they give me a better sense of the current scenario.

The Stock to Flow Model

The stock-to-flow model for Bitcoin was popularised by Twitter user @planb and is all about modeling Bitcoin’s value with scarcity.

This model treats Bitcoin as being comparable to commodities such as gold, silver or platinum. These are known as ‘store of value’ commodities because they retain value over long time frames due to their relative scarcity. It is difficult to significantly increase their supply i.e. the process of searching for gold and then mining it is expensive and takes time. Bitcoin is similar because it is also scarce. In fact, it is the first-ever scarce digital object to exist. There are a limited number of coins in existence and it will take a lot of electricity and computing effort to mine the 3 million outstanding coins still to be mined, therefore the supply rate is consistently low.

Stock-to-flow ratios are used to evaluate the current stock of a commodity (total amount currently available) against the flow of new production (amount mined that specific year).

For store of value (SoV) commodities like gold, platinum, or silver, a high ratio indicates that they are mostly not consumed in industrial applications. Instead, the majority is stored as a monetary hedge, thus driving up the stock-to-flow ratio.

A higher ratio indicates that the commodity is increasingly scarce – and therefore more valuable as a store of value.

Bitcoin stock to flow

As you can see in the chart (as at January 2021), the price is tracking the model very closely and seems to be on course to the $100,000 level where the model predicts things will flatten out for a few years until the following halving.

A more detailed version of the chart and explanation of what everything means can be found here.

Net Unrealized Profit/Loss

Profit and Loss metrics answer the question: if all units of a given currency were sold today, how much would investors stand to gain or lose?

By looking at the delta between the price when a UTXO was created vs. the current price of an asset, we can determine whether the specific coins in that UTXO are in a state of unrealized profit (price has increased) or loss (price has decreased). When looking at this across the entire network, we can see how much of the network is in profit, and how much is in loss.

net unrealised profit bitcoin

NUPL (Net Unrealized Profit/Loss) specifically looks at the difference between Unrealized Profit and Unrealized Loss to determine whether the network as a whole is currently in a state of profit or loss.

Any value above zero indicates that the network is in a state of net profit, while values below zero indicate a state of net loss. In general, the further NUPL deviates from zero, the closer the market trends towards tops and bottoms. As such, NUPL can help investors identify when to take profit (blue) and when to re-enter (red).

The Rainbow Chart

Here’s the Bitcoin rainbow chart as at January 2021. The Rainbow Chart is meant to be a fun way of looking at long term price movements, disregarding the daily volatility “noise”. The color bands follow a logarithmic regression (introduced by Bitcointalk User trolololo in 2014), but are otherwise completely arbitrary and without any scientific basis.

Whilst the original chart was graded as simply ‘buy’, ‘sell’ or ‘average’, this has now taken on a finer delimitation.

At the top end we have ‘maximum bubble territory’, going through sell indicators, building FOMO, and down to ‘HODL!’ in the middle yellow band.

On the lower end of the spectrum, the scale goes through various levels of good value, down to the final ‘basically a fire sale’ band.

bitcoin rainbow chart

Back in March 2020, I had written about it being a fantastic time to stockpile on Bitcoin. To zoom in on the chart then:

This doesn’t prove anything about the chart, but it did work perfectly well in the last dip. Right now, it seems like we’re heading into some shaky territory where a good dip would not be that unexpected. However, there still seems to be some room for growth.

The Bitcoin-gold rate peaks at an all-time high

Early on the morning of January 1st, the Bitcoin-gold rate peaked at 15.62 ounces, surpassing the December 2017 peak of $29,000. Even though gold also experienced large gains in 2020, these gains were minimal in comparison to Bitcoin’s meteoric rise. Gold ended the year with a 25% gain while Bitcoin had an increase of 300%. Investors seem to be choosing the “efficiency” and “portability” of digital currency over gold.

JPMorgan Chase analysts believe Bitcoin’s digital gold narrative is taking capital from precious metals. It is thought that Bitcoin’s supply shortage will drive its prices higher as 2021 progresses.

HODL Waves

The HODL Waves is a data visualization that displays colored bands representing the percentage of total bitcoin and the length of time that bitcoin has been sitting in a given address. This visualization is made possible because the bitcoin blockchain is completely public. You can read the original article that describes them here. By comparing the age of bitcoin sitting in addresses to the current US dollar prices, we can make some interesting conjectures about the bitcoin economy and the sentiment of HODLers.

hodl waves 2020

While the price crash in March was sharp, we can see that the coins shifting hands during that time were coins that had previously moved within the last 6 months, indicating that the crash may have been caused by leveraged traders getting liquidated. Long-term holders were unaffected by the movement, meaning that coins that had been sitting in addresses for longer than 6 months became a higher percentage of the total bitcoin sitting in addresses. This helps explain the rapid 2 month recovery back to the previous prices.

On-chain data provided by Coin Metrics also shows that recent price movements were likely mostly driven by shorter-term and relatively new holders. Long term holders appear unfazed in spite of the severe market downturn.

While market cap for most cryptoassets fell, the market cap for most stablecoins increased. This potentially signals that investors were piling into “cash,” or at least crypto cash equivalents.

As of January 2021, we can see that 59.03% of bitcoin has been held for longer than 1 year. That is still a long way away from the bottom of the last cycle, which was April 10, 2018 at a price of $6,839 (after running up from $172 in January 2015), when only 41.1% of available bitcoin was held for 1 year or longer. If the 2018-2020 HODL wave looks anything like the last one, we can expect some extreme price movements as new entrants try to recapture that ~18% difference between 59.03% and 41.1% of long-term held bitcoin.

The Relative Strength Index

The relative strength index (RSI) is a momentum indicator used in technical analysis that measures the magnitude of recent price changes to evaluate overbought or oversold conditions in the price of a stock or other asset. The RSI is displayed as an oscillator (a line graph that moves between two extremes) and can have a reading from 0 to 100. The indicator was originally developed by J. Welles Wilder Jr. and introduced in his seminal 1978 book, “New Concepts in Technical Trading Systems.”

Traditional interpretation and usage of the RSI are that values of 70 or above indicate that a security is becoming overbought or overvalued and may be primed for a trend reversal or corrective pullback in price. An RSI reading of 30 or below indicates an oversold or undervalued condition.


Who is investing in Bitcoin?

In case you think it’s just some weirdos and crazy retail investors who are piling into Bitcoin, have a look at what these well-known professional investors are saying:

Legendary global macro investor Raoul Pal says he’s never seen a trade as dominant as Bitcoin.

J.P. Morgan, whose CEO Jamie Dimon called bitcoin a fraud just three years ago, published an in-depth feature in its flagship research series comparing bitcoin to gold, and saying its price could double or triple if current trends continue. Earlier this year, J.P. Morgan also agreed to provide banking services to crypto pioneer Coinbase, and has been getting involved in additional ways.

Billionaire U.S. investor Stanley Druckenmiller is long on bitcoin. In a Monday CNBC appearance, Druckenmiller disclosed a bitcoin position significantly smaller than his gold horde. However, he predicts bitcoin will outperform gold in the long run – largely due to millennial and Silicon Valley attraction to the crypto scene. “Frankly, if the gold bet works the bitcoin bet will probably work better because it’s thinner, more illiquid and has a lot more beta to it,” he said. Drunkenmiller made headlines last week for his bearish views on the U.S. dollar, which he suspects will decline for the next three to four years.

Mutual fund titan Bill Miller has also taken a fancy to bitcoin. “One of the things that’s interesting about bitcoin is that it gets less risky the higher it goes,” Miller told CNBC in a January 2021 interview. “That’s the opposite of what happens with most stocks.” He also said that “Bitcoin could be rat poison, and the rat could be cash.” in his fund’s latest investment letter, referring to a similar comment of the opposite effect from Warren Buffett.

Miller continued to describe bitcoin as “a supply-and-demand story” with roughly 900 bitcoins created each day and a swarm of retail and institutional investors scooping up enormous chunks of available supply.

The Grayscale Bitcoin Trust has accumulated more than 3% of the total bitcoin supply. That’s according to Bloomberg, which interviewed CEO Michael Sonnenshein for the piece.

The interesting thing about what happened in the Q4 Bitcoin price run-up, is that most retail investors were sitting by the sidelines.

There were relatively few new investors joining in the fun. The big reason, in my opinion, is that most people were acting extra cautious during 2020 as the reality is that a lot of jobs and businesses were and are still threatened. If you don’t have a lot of extra cash lying around, you most likely have your money invested in assets that are hard to sell at the moment, or you’re just sitting in cash due to the uncertain situation.

While the smart money was accumulating Bitcoin, retail interest only increased slightly.

Historically, retail floods into Bitcoin after breaking previous all-time-highs. If history repeats, Bitcoin is going to be explosive over the coming 18 months.

Now that we started 2021 so strongly, we are seeing retail investor interest go up a few notches, and this can be verified using social signals as well as tools like Google Trends.

Google trends bitcoin

This chart from January 2020 shows the historical interest on the web for the term “buy bitcoin”. You can see a peak at the end of 2017 where we had the previous big runup. If you were aware of Bitcoin back then, you might remember that many people were talking about it, and it wasn’t uncommon to hear even taxi drivers and grandmothers talking about their Bitcoin investment. I don’t see that kind of thing happening again just yet, which further lends credibility to the idea that this time it’s different and the price going higher is driven by institutional investing rather than retail.

Companies Moving their Reserves to Bitcoin

Many public and private companies have started to adopt Bitcoin as their reserve currency.

Here is a list of the biggest corporate holdings:

  • MicroStrategy – 71,079 BTC
  • Tesla – 43,000 BTC
  • Galaxy Digital Holdings – 16,402 BTC
  • Mass Mutual – 5,300 BTC
  • Marathon Patent Group – 4,813 BTC
  • Square – 4,709 BTC
  • Hut 8 – 2,851 BTC
  • Voyager Digital – 1,239 BTC
  • Riot Blockchain – 1,175 BTC

Tesla, led by the world’s richest man Elon Musk, invested $1.5 billion of its cash reserves in bitcoin, according to a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission annual report. The popular auto manufacturer said bitcoin offers “more flexibility to further diversify and maximize returns on our cash.” The company had more than $19 billion in cash and cash equivalents at the end of 2020.

Microstrategy was the first to publicly announce their move by purchasing 21,454 bitcoins at an aggregate purchase price of $250 million., but others have followed hot on their heels, including the e-payments giant Square, led by Twitter founder Jack Dorsey.

This was followed up with another purchase in September 2020.

On September 14, 2020, MicroStrategy completed its acquisition of 16,796 additional bitcoins at an aggregate purchase price of $175 million. To date, we have purchased a total of 38,250 bitcoins at an aggregate purchase price of $425 million, inclusive of fees and expenses.

— Michael Saylor⚡️ (@saylor) September 15, 2020

Even then, Saylor wasn’t content with his company’s stash. He went ahead and raised $650 million to purchase more crypto in December 2021.

MicroStrategy has purchased an additional 29,646 bitcoins for $650 million at an average price of $21,925 per #bitcoin and now #hodl an aggregate of 70,470 bitcoins purchased for $1.125 billion at an average price of $15,964 per bitcoin.https://t.co/j6wVLXIzoa

— Michael Saylor⚡️ (@saylor) December 21, 2020

Think he’d had enough then? Of course not. He went ahead and bought some more in January 2021.

MicroStrategy has purchased approximately 314 bitcoins for $10.0 million in cash in accordance with its Treasury Reserve Policy, at an average price of approximately $31,808 per bitcoin. We now hold approximately 70,784 bitcoins.https://t.co/zMJSH29bmC

— Michael Saylor⚡️ (@saylor) January 22, 2021

Here’s why, in his own words:

“This investment reflects our belief that Bitcoin, as the world’s most widely-adopted cryptocurrency, is a dependable store of value and an attractive investment asset with more long-term appreciation potential than holding cash. Since its inception over a decade ago, Bitcoin has emerged as a significant addition to the global financial system, with characteristics that are useful to both individuals and institutions. MicroStrategy has recognized Bitcoin as a legitimate investment asset that can be superior to cash and accordingly has made Bitcoin the principal holding in its treasury reserve strategy.

MicroStrategy spent months deliberating to determine our capital allocation strategy. Our decision to invest in Bitcoin at this time was driven in part by a confluence of macro factors affecting the economic and business landscape that we believe is creating long-term risks for our corporate treasury program ― risks that should be addressed proactively. Those macro factors include, among other things, the economic and public health crisis precipitated by COVID-19, unprecedented government financial stimulus measures including quantitative easing adopted around the world, and global political and economic uncertainty. We believe that, together, these and other factors may well have a significant depreciating effect on the long-term real value of fiat currencies and many other conventional asset types, including many of the assets traditionally held as part of corporate treasury operations.”

I believe other private and public companies will follow suit.

#Bitcoin provides Integrity to the digital monetary system. Liquidity, Scalability, Security, Functionality, Performance, Compatibility, Accessibility, Compliance, & Popularity will be delivered by those individuals, enterprises & agencies that support the Bitcoin Standard.

— Michael Saylor⚡️ (@saylor) November 1, 2020

This means that Bitcoin is much harder for any government to ban, plus it also means that millions of people are now indirectly invested into Bitcoin by holding shares of these companies.

It’s really exciting to see so many companies hold large Bitcoin treasuries. Here’s a list of publicly trading companies that have publicly announced their Bitcoin positions.

Morgan Stanley Acquires 10.9% of MicroStrategy

The financial giant, Morgan Stanley, has purchased 650,000 shares in MicroStrategy boosting its total to 792,627 and bringing its total ownership in the company to 10.9%.

Why?

The same reason why so many retail investors have been investing in MicroStrategy, sending its stock price through the roof.

MicroStrategy’s shares are largely tracking the price of bitcoin. Therefore, it’s hard for one to not assume that this is a strategic move on the institutional giant’s part. Morgan Stanley will be looking to benefit from bitcoin’s historic run without actually having to become a HODLer.

Keep in mind that for many people around the world it is still very hard to buy Bitcoin due to laws in their countries, banking obstacles, etc. But buying a stock is a much more straightforward affair, so for now MicroStrategy acts as a proxy for Bitcoin.

Cities Buying Bitcoin

Francis Suarez, the mayor of Miami, announced his interest in acquiring Bitcoin for the city’s reserves, in yet another domino effect moment. Not only that, he is working day and night to turn Miami into a hub for crypto innovation.

WOW! Miami Mayor @FrancisSuarez just got Miami into Bitcoin.

– Employees paid in BTC
– Residents pay fees in BTC
– Taxes in BTC
– City Treasury in BTC

Absolutely unreal. The first Bitcoin municipal in the United States 🔥 pic.twitter.com/zv7rM7C39B

— Pomp 🌪 (@APompliano) February 12, 2021

That’s the power of Bitcoin. Not only has it provided the opportunity for a wealth transfer, but it’s also changing the geographical hierarchy of the world. Those cities and countries that embrace Bitcoin and freedom will gain an edge over those that don’t.

It’s only a matter of time before more cities buy Bitcoin, and shortly after countries will announce it. By then, there would be no doubts whatsoever about whether governments will ban Bitcoin.

Countries Accepting Tax Payments in Crypto

The Swiss canton of Zug – dubbed “Crypto Valley” thanks to the many digital-asset companies drawn to the jurisdiction because of its friendly blockchain and crypto regulation – has started accepting tax payments in cryptocurrency. For now, there’s a cap of 100,000 Swiss francs ($111,300). “As the home of the Crypto Valley, it is important to us to further promote and simplify the use of cryptocurrencies in everyday life,” said Zug’s finance director, Heinz Tannler, when the tax initiative was announced.

The PayPal Effect

PayPal, Cash App, Revolut and others have also contributed to Bitcoin’s high demand and its subsequent shortage. Grayscale Capital also deserves a mention in this section. All these companies have been scooping up Bitcoin to offer it to their customers.

Financial services giant PayPal ($250 billion market cap) was huge news towards the end of 2020, as it announced that it will allow its ~200M U.S. users to buy, sell, and store cryptoassets on its platform, starting with Bitcoin, Ethereum, Bitcoin Cash, and Litecoin. This opened up Bitcoin investing to millions of users who previously did not have the confidence or skills to get themselves some Bitcoin, but can now purchase it through a familiar interface. Given that PayPal is used by people of all ages and nationalities, this is a really important development.

What’s more, the firm said it would enable its 26 million merchants to accept crypto as a payment method, starting in early 2021. This news was huge. It was likely the biggest development of 2020 for crypto. It represents a major leveling-up of the asset class.

The news sent crypto prices sharply higher. Bitcoin rose more than 10% to a multiyear high above $13,000, and other assets followed, including Litecoin, up 15%.

Not to mention the fact that huge players like PayPal making moves like these make it less and less likely that the US government will ever make any drastic moves such as banning bitcoin outright.

Today, the largest crypto wallet, Blockchain.com, has 50 million users. Coinbase has 40 million, Square has 30 million, and Robinhood has 12 million. At nearly 200 million U.S. users, PayPal is 4x the size of the largest existing platform.

PayPal’s smaller competitor Square allows users to buy and sell bitcoin through its Cash App. Flows have been significant: In Q2 2020, for instance, CashApp users purchased $875 million of bitcoin.

In addition to demand for investment purposes, PayPal is uniquely suited to finally break down the door to the widespread use of crypto as a payment vehicle.

By early 2021, PayPal’s 26 million merchants will be able to accept payment in bitcoin, ethereum, Litecoin, and Bitcoin Cash. These merchants aren’t just large firms like eBay, but millions of small businesses processing transactions over the internet. In many ways, you could imagine they might be the most likely audience to embrace crypto.

PayPal’s initial retail push will have limitations. But if even just 0.1% of retailers start accepting crypto payments, you have the beginnings of a real commerce use case that has long been sought by the industry.

The final reason this is a big deal is simply that PayPal is a significant business; more significant than many people think.

PayPal today boasts a market capitalization of $250 billion, significantly larger than Bank of America ($208 billion), Wells Fargo ($93 billion), Morgan Stanley ($91 billion), Citi ($89 billion), and Goldman Sachs ($70 billion), among others.

They’re also a highly regulated money transmitter and financial institution. PayPal’s move shows other such institutions that crypto is now possible on the largest possible scale.

Mastercard, another big player, is planning to give merchants the option to receive payments in cryptocurrency later in 2021.

In fact, a recent letter published by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency clarified that national banks can custody cryptoassets themselves. With PayPal now leading the way, what reasons do banks and other payments companies have for not offering comparable services?

ETFs are Coming

Crypto ETFs have long been in the pipeline, however, the US SEC has refused all of the applications so far.

In February, however, the Ontario (Canada) Securities Commission gave the go-ahead to the first Bitcoin exchange-traded-fund (ETF) in North America. The portfolio will be managed by Purpose Investments and will be listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange in Canadian Dollars. The fund seeks to replicate the performance of the price of bitcoin (-0.89% for fees and expenses) according to a fact sheet posted online by the Canada-based asset manager, Purpose Investments.

Profiting from Bitcoin

Since I know many people visit this article with the idea of making money from crypto, here are some of the ways you can do so. I purposefully left this section towards the end of the article as it’s very important to educate yourself before you dive in.

Do your own research always, as this is a very volatile space that is in its early stages. Having said that, for those who know what they are doing, the returns can be incredible.

Bitcoin Trading

In these volatile times, there is a big opportunity to make some money just trading Bitcoin. The idea is to buy when the price is suppressed and sell when it is rallying.

If you’re not confident doing that yourself, you can make use of a service like CopyTrading from eToro.

With CopyTrading, trades will be automatically copied to your account allowing you to manage your portfolio in a simple and transparent way. With over 3 million traders to choose from, you can interact with and copy multiple traders.

To get started, create your free eToro account. All information you submit is protected by the latest encryption technology and will not be shared with third parties. Once your account is created, select one of the available payment methods to fund it.

Use the eToro People page to find eToro’s best traders. Make sure to check the traders’  portfolios and trading stats. To base your copy trading portfolio on specific markets (i.e. crypto), use the eToro Markets page to see which investors are trading in the market of your choice.
Once you’ve found the crypto traders you want to copy, simply click on Copy to start copying their positions. You will be asked to specify the percentage of your funds you want to allocate for copying. The amounts for the copied trades will be calculated accordingly.

The trades made by those you’ve chosen will be automatically recreated in your account. You retain full control of your account and can take the trade over, or stop copying a trader altogether, at any time. Finally, always be on the lookout for new trading stars to add to your copy trading portfolio!

Here are a few more tips for trading cryptos:

  • The stock market is only open less than 20% of the time when cryptocurrency markets are open
  • Bitcoin is the most traded on Wednesday and Thursday and the most volatile on Thursday
  • It is the least traded on weekends and also the least volatile

The average volume based on the time of the day shows that the highest volume happens around 10am ET and then gradually decreases until it peaks again around 8pm ET. Volume is the lowest from 10pm to 5am, which is usually the time when most of the people on the East Coast sleep.

Disclaimer

CFDs are complex instruments and come with a high risk of losing money rapidly due to leverage. 75% of retail investor accounts lose money when trading CFDs with this provider. You should consider whether you understand how CFDs work, and whether you can afford to take the high risk of losing your money. 

Cryptoassets are volatile instruments that can fluctuate widely in a very short timeframe and therefore are not appropriate for all investors. Other than via CFDs, trading crypto assets is unregulated and therefore is not supervised by any EU regulatory framework. Your capital is at risk.

Buy and Hold Bitcoin

buy bitcoin from coinbase

If it’s your first time getting into Bitcoin, an easy strategy would be to just buy and hold this crypto. I recommend buying from these exchanges:

I would recommend then storing your Bitcoin and other crypto-assets offline using a Ledger Nano or Trezor. You should store the 24-word seed phrase on a Billfodl or Cryptosteel.

If you want to read more about custodying your Bitcoin, read my in-depth article on that subject.

How to Buy Bitcoin with PayPal

If you have funds in your PayPal account that you’d like to use to buy Bitcoin right away, you’ll be pleased to know that both Coinbase and eToro allow funding from PayPal accounts, as I detailed in my guide to buying crypto with PayPal.

Need Cash? Take a crypto loan instead of selling

If you need quick liquidity, you typically sell-off some of your assets. Anyone can run into an emergency situation.

But there are alternatives to selling. Crypto backed P2P loan platforms are very popular, big holders of crypto prefer to get loans in fiat currency using their crypto as collateral instead of selling their crypto.

You could also use your crypto to earn interest using platforms like Youhodler.

While buying and holding has traditionally been the easiest and probably best way to profit from the Bitcoin boom, there are several other ways to make money by getting involved with Bitcoin.

Cloud Mining

Cloud mining consists of contributing fiat money to join a mining pool. Genesis is probably the only mining pool that I would trust as of 2020, however profits are far from guaranteed and I think it’s still too risky a proposition compared to just buying and holding, so I have so far avoided getting involved in mining.

You could, of course, also set up your own mine, but at this stage, you would need a big investment and be very technical to even have any chance of successfully doing this. Unless you’re a mining expert, don’t even think of setting up your own mining setup.

Arbitrage Trading Software

A common scam – avoid outright. There are many websites that promote their software that purportedly generates insane daily profits through some proprietary genius trading and arbitrage techniques.

Predictably, they are all scams and Ponzi schemes, and you are sure to find a referral program meant to be the main driver of any returns. Examples include Bitconnect, Arbistar, Mind Capital and Kualian.

Concluding Thoughts

When this is over

➡️The fed will have printed trillions
➡️USD will have lost value
➡️Leaders will have lost credibility

✅There still won’t be more than 21M $BTC
✅#Bitcoin will still be the hardest money ever created
✅Next block: still in 10 min

See you on the other side!

— Lina Seiche (@LinaSeiche) March 13, 2020

I think we should focus on the long term, the big picture. If you have faith in this technology you know this is the worst time to panic sell and the best to keep hodling, or better yet, buy more crypto.

The other alternative is to engage in trading, if you have the right skills to do so. In shaky times like these when the price tends to be quite volatile, trading can be a very profitable endeavor.

Given the huge upside potential and promise for Bitcoin, I think that the easiest and most fool-proof strategy right now is to just buy Bitcoin and store it safely. Wait a few years and if all goes according to the ideas exposed above you will be sitting on a nice increase in your net worth.

If Bitcoin can remain decoupled from US Equities & the market treats it as Digital Gold, 2021-2022 should be an amazing cycle for BTC. Always follow the present strongest force as that drives market direction – Presently, that is the Demand Side fueled by Funds & Retail Money.

I like to use the Whatifihodl tool to figure out how much a current Bitcoin stash will be worth in the future based on price projections. You could also use Hodlcalc to see how much Bitcoins bought in the past would be worth today. It’s a great tool if you fancy ending up kick yourself for not getting involved earlier than you did 🙂

Alternative Currencies to Buy

While there are many hardcore Bitcoiners who think that all other cryptocurrencies are rubbish, I would disagree. I’ve written about a number of other cryptocurrencies that are worth looking into, and due to the growth of DeFi I would say that Ethereum is one, in particular, to keep an eye on.

Taxation

You also need to keep in mind that in most countries crypto trading is taxable. Read about how crypto is taxed around the world or how crypto investors have scored a great deal with Portugal.

If you already know how your country taxes Bitcoin and you just want to find a way to quickly prepare your taxes, I strongly suggest you take a look at Cointracker.

This is a service that only tracks your crypto portfolio across various exchanges and cold storage devices, but can also prepare your taxes for you in a few minutes. They can also execute strategies like tax loss harvesting. If you do any trading or use bitcoin for payments this is an essential tool as you will have many transactions to record for tax purposes, and you can’t afford the possible mistakes that come from the tedious manual work of calculations.


In conclusion, I think that we are seeing a clear trend towards Bitcoin adoption. Whether or not you “believe in bitcoin,” it’s here to stay.

It took 12 years, but it’s gained acceptance and there’s no going back.  The companies, asset managers, and governments that stop fighting the rising tide and decide to surf it will be the ones that fare the best.

If you’re ready to buy Bitcoin and cryptos and want to read more about the buying process, do check out my guide to investing in Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies.

Filed under: Cryptoassets, Money, Top Post

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Best Time to Buy Cryptocurrency

Cryptocurrency is a volatile asset class that experiences a lot of ups and downs. Because of that, people often get the idea that they should be trying to time their investments -- purchasing within specific windows to get the best possible price. However, because cryptocurrency is traded 24 hours a day by investors around the world, timing a cryptocurrency buy is never cut and dried.

If you want to invest in crypto, your best bet is to practice dollar-cost averaging. Using this method, you buy a little bit at a time over an extended period. Even if you invest at some intervals that turn out to be not all that low, you will catch others that are very low, and it may average out.

There are ebbs and flows to the crypto market that vary wildly depending on the specific cryptocurrency you're buying. Tokens may trade with yet another pattern. For someone intent on timing a crypto purchase, it will pay to really analyze the history of specific investment types.

A person sits in front of two computers with crypto exchange charts on them.

Image source: Getty Images.

When is the best time to buy cryptocurrency?

To make it short and sweet, the best time to buy a cryptocurrency is when you're ready to buy a cryptocurrency. Using the dollar-cost averaging approach, you'll be able to control the volatility of your own cost (at least at some level) and avoid the roller coasters.

Never put more into a crypto than you're willing to lose. They are not guaranteed winners or asset classes that provide any sort of security, especially if they tank to zero. Some people have made significant amounts of money on the right buy at the right time, but this is often just luck and not from timing the market.

Best time of the day to buy cryptocurrency

Again, because crypto trades all day long, even into the wee hours of the morning (no matter where you happen to live), timing your trades to a certain time of day can be fraught with peril. However, if you analyze a few months of data, a few very general patterns emerge.

Comparing the trading activity of Bitcoin(CRYPTO:BTC), Ether(CRYPTO:ETH), Solana(CRYPTO:SOL), and Cardano(CRYPTO:ADA) -- cryptos with some of the highest cap rates -- shows that they tend to rise and fall together, which is pretty handy for the sake of comparing windows of time for buys.

Looking at data from October and November, the very best time of day to purchase these popular cryptocurrencies generally was in the morning, and the earlier, the better. Other coins that are not considered to be as "serious" also followed similar patterns as Bitcoin and Ether, such as Shiba Inu(CRYPTO:SHIB) and Dogecoin(CRYPTO:DOGE).

Best time of the week to buy cryptocurrency

Based on the same data used to determine the best time of day to buy crypto, the best time of the week to buy crypto seems to be Thursday. Yes, Thursday. Six of the eight weeks saw a dip on that day. If that trend continues (which is most certainly not guaranteed), Thursday morning is the best time to buy.

The second-best day of the week to buy is Monday (five of eight saw a dip), followed by Friday and Saturday (four of eight for both).

Best time of the month to buy cryptocurrency

With crypto, everything is constantly changing. It's a problem if you're trying to time purchases. For the moment, however, the best time of the month to buy is near the end. Values tend to rise in the first 10 days of the month, followed by a price collapse (probably because people are selling after increases) in the second half of the month.

Again, this may vary with other cryptos or smaller altcoins. Based on the coins with the highest cap rates, however, the trend seems to be fairly consistent.

A chart showing the changes in price of Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, and Cardano from Sept 1 to Nov 30

Source: YCharts.

What is the best move with crypto?

Timing a cryptocurrency buy can be a difficult if not treacherous thing to attempt since there are all kinds of elements that go into the price of a coin. Although there are fewer personality-based drivers (such as sex scandals involving CEOs of major companies, for example), there are more lemming-like sell-offs. People have only so much tolerance for risk, and the fear of missing out on selling a crypto holding for a short-term profit is a tempting siren song.

With crypto, like with any kind of investment, your best bet will always be to hold on for the longer term, and buy a little bit at a time. Your highest returns will come from this strategy, even though it's not particularly sexy and doesn't provide any of that Vegas-like thrill for investors hoping for a quick winner.

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₿ Should You Buy Bitcoin Right Now? – An Expert Opinion

Buy Bitcoin on Coinbase

As Bitcoin continues to have an is it right time to buy bitcoin today bull run in 2021, the question on everyone’s mind is whether this is the right time to buy.

“Hey Jean, do you think this is a good time to buy myself some Bitcoin?”

My inbox has been is it right time to buy bitcoin today with slight variations of this question, so I wrote this article to is it right time to buy bitcoin today my friends, family, and the general public process this decision and arrive at an informed decision.

I am a strong believer in the long-term future of Bitcoin due to its fundamental properties, which we’ll delve into later in this article. I have therefore been happy to buy at any price point since Bitcoin’s inception, is it right time to buy bitcoin today, as I think the price has a long way to go still and we’re in the early years of crypto, comparable to watching the dawn of commercial internet usage in the mid to late 90s.

I consider Bitcoin as the best investment of our lifetime, and will do my best to explain why I think so in the rest of this article.


How to Get Started with Bitcoin

I know you might now have time or even sufficient interest to read the rest of this long article, so again, if you’re already convinced about buying, here are my basic recommendations for entering the Bitcoin space.

buy bitcoin from coinbase

In the meantime, if you’re already convinced and you came here looking for the best places to buy Bitcoin right away, here’s what you need to do next:

There are hundreds of places you can buy Bitcoin from, but I would suggest that you stick to the exchanges that have been established for many years and have a perfect security track record. It’s important that these exchanges are regulated where applicable. These are my recommendations:

They are the world’s safest, biggest and most reputable exchanges and you can’t go wrong with them.

I’ve also written a guide on how to buy Bitcoin in Europe where I go into further detail on how you can get your hands on some Bitcoin.

Once you have your Bitcoin, is it right time to buy bitcoin today, you can purchase a Ledger Nano to store that Bitcoin offline and away from any hackers.

Trade Bitcoin on Binance

If you’re more inclined to trading, you can check out platforms like eToro or Bitfinex.

If you just want to hold your Bitcoin while earning good returns, you can check out some crypto platforms that offer a savings account. My favorites at the moment are BlockFi and YouHodler, but you can learn more about those options here.

Towards the end of the article, I will again discuss some of the ways that you can make money with Bitcoin.


Waiting to Buy the Dip

By far the most frequent follow-up question I get and the biggest block I see people facing, is this:

“What price should I buy at?”

I don’t believe in timing the is it right time to buy bitcoin today on any investment, unless there is a big macro event like the financial crisis of 2007-2008 and the COVID dip of March 2020.

Therefore, for any investment I make, I’m typically looking 5-10 years ahead and thinking about how much value that investment can generate within that timeframe. The whole crypto space is still in its infancy, and Bitcoin is it right time to buy bitcoin today enormous room for growth, thus any price point is a good entry in my opinion.

I think we’ll be seeing many more similar tweets in the coming months and years:

#Bitcoin is $40,400 right now.

You could have bought it for $29,000 last week. Still waiting for the dip?

— Bitcoin Archive 🗄🚀🌔 (@BTC_Archive) February 6, 2021

Unfortunately, people are really attracted to the idea of buying the dip. The problem is that the dip may never come, and if you know people who did buy some dip, it’s likely that they were in a position to buy at an even lower price a few months earlier but didn’t have the courage to pull the trigger. If that’s not the case, in 90% of the cases I would attribute managing to buy a dip to pure luck.

Even in the case bitcoin investing 2022 get the major macro events like the 2007 crisis and March 2020 dip, to make the most of those events you’d have had to have a lot of spare cash lying around and ready to be invested. Again, mostly, a question of luck.

See also: The Best crypto trading apps and exchanges

However, if you feel uncomfortable about choosing a particular price point to make your entry, consider investing a fixed amount periodically, say every month. In that way, you’ll smooth out any drastic price variances and you’ll be building up your Bitcoin portfolio over time. The disadvantage of that strategy is that Bitcoin might make a sharp move upwards in the meantime.

Ok, with those preliminary recommendations out of the way, let’s proceed with the reasons why I think Bitcoin is the best investment of our generation.


Why am I Bullish on Bitcoin?

Last year, after the March dip, I had written about that being a great time to increase one’s Bitcoin holding, as the market was ruled by fear.

Since then, the price has risen steadily, breaking through its former all-time high in a dramatic way. In 2021, it seems that the bull market is back in full swing.

Before we continue, let me reiterate that nobody can predict Bitcoin’s price, and neither can I. Even if I had some hunch, I would not want you to blindly follow what I say, because I am against getting financial advice online.

However, I use this blog as my own small space to think about things, and writing is how I best formulate my ideas. As an added benefit, I get to interact with other investors and people whose ideas contrast mine, thus helping me further refine my thoughts.

The way I see it now, Bitcoin seems to be following the stock-to-flow model, is it right time to buy bitcoin today. Proponents of this model had predicted that the price of Bitcoin should reach skyrim how to make money fast in whiterun between $100k and $200k at some point in 2021 or 2022. This is based on an analysis of the demand and scarcity of this asset, and comparing it to other assets like gold.

Read more: The Best Books about Bitcoin and Crypto

This is a very bullish target price, although it does seem much more realistic now that Bitcoin has broken through $40k. Irrespective of the price swings, I remain very bullish on the Bitcoin network long-term, due to the fundamentals being stronger than ever.

Let’s now consider a few major themes that add to the bullish argument for Bitcoin.

Bitcoin Hoarding

During bull markets, the long term Bitcoin holders hoard the supply in anticipation of a major price increase. As of November 2020, over 62% of the Bitcoin supply hasn’t moved in over one year (all-time-high). This is  a very bullish indicator.

All indications say we’re at the beginning of the next major bull run. Smart money is flooding in, “bad news” doesn’t negatively affect the price, and the existing investor base is hoarding the outstanding supply.etoro buy bitcoin

Bitcoin as a Safe Haven

The US federal reserved printed ungodly amounts of dollars last year and then pumped into traditional financial markets last year to keep them from faltering. The European Union followed suit. It’s quite logical that with more money in the system, the value of your existing stash will lose value as money is less scarce than it was before. Bitcoin on the other hand maintains its hard cap on the total amount that can ever be issued.

Hence we get a chart like this, where fiat currencies unequivocally lose value against hard assets like Bitcoin.

fiat vs bitcoin

Big institutions and corporate entities have understood this very well. In fact, their main play is that of protecting their financial reserves, rather than buying Bitcoin in the hope of exponential growth. They want to protect the store of value they have accumulated over the years, and they know that if they don’t buy a hard asset like Bitcoin that value will be greatly diminished by the effects of money printing and other fiscal policies.

The Great Upcoming Wealth Transfer

Kraken Intelligence, is it right time to buy bitcoin today, the in-house research team at the crypto exchange of the same name, is it right time to buy bitcoin today, released a new report entitled “Inheriting USDs & Acquiring BTCs: How ‘The Great Wealth Transfer’ Will Fuel ‘The Great Bitcoin Adoption.’”

According to the report, if American Millennials were to invest at least five percent of their inherited wealth into Bitcoin (BTC), they could drive the price up to $350,000 in 2044. This would effectively give the generational group almost $70 trillion of value from a $971 billion investment.

2/ Assuming a 5% investment allocation and a 2% inheritance tax, by 2044 Gen X and Millennials could invest an estimated $971 billion into #Bitcoin as they inherit wealth.

World investment could make this figure much higher. pic.twitter.com/r0VV97HIgz

— Kraken Exchange (@krakenfx) March 25, 2020

With many older Americans on the verge of retirement, the report suggests those in younger generations who are not only more familiar with but more accepting of Bitcoin will have more options investing in the future.

“…a disproportionate percentage of the Millennials and Gen X will continue to be the driving force of adoption [of cryptocurrency] for the foreseeable future. While this can be explained in part by the fact that both generations harness a greater technological competence than their elders, we should also consider that bitcoin’s current volatility is unsuitable for individuals nearing or in retirement.”

Baby Boomers in the United States currently control approximately 57% of the total wealth, $50 trillion of which will pass to Millennials and Gen Xers in the next two years. This redistribution is referred to as the “Great Wealth Transfer”.

If younger people were to use just 1% of this wealth to then invest in BTC, the price could rise to $70,000 — if not more — in 2044. This is based only on investors in the U.S., meaning the actual numbers could easily be higher.

Bitcoin entering the Fourth Era

According to an analysis by Bitwise Asset Management, Bitcoin is entering its fourth era in which it will go mainstream, and if previous eras are anything to go by, we should be seeing a big run-up to $100,000 or more in the next 2 years.

Network Effects

Crypto, or digital assets, are a highly correlated space. The best coins will always have the softest bear markets, and it is becoming clear that Ethereum wasn’t much worse on the COVID correction and is punching above its weight in the rally. With a network value around 15% of Bitcoin, there is the potential for a catch-up, but its network is smaller on the most important measures.

Crypto valuation is all about the network. While Ethereum processes a large number of transactions, they tend to be small. It won’t catch up unless its network sees a surge in transaction value, which means either many more transactions or to attract a greater share of the larger ones. But this is a youthful space, and anything is possible in crypto.

In the meantime, Bitcoin is heading back to $20 billion of network transfer each week. So long as this goes up, so will the price of Bitcoin.

New Crypto-First Banks

Less than two months after cryptocurrency exchange Kraken secured its Wyoming bank charter to start a crypto bank, a second player did the same.

Startup Crypto Bank Avanti Unanimously Wins Wyoming Bank Charter: Avanti Founder and CEO Caitlin Long, a Wall Street Is it right time to buy bitcoin today who used to run Morgan Stanley’s pension advisory group, expects the bank to launch sometime in 2021.

These are very bullish developments for the crypto space in general, as banking has long been a major Achilles heel for crypto investors and businesses. Many of the world’s banks were and still are hesitant about providing services to crypto-related companies, and some even prohibit normal people from transferring fiat currency to exchange accounts or withdrawing them back from exchanges to the banks.

These new banks, and others that are pivoting or changing their previous stance, will now change the scenario and make crypto investing much more accessible, paving the way for many new investors to enter and get their first holdings.

Click here to check out some forward-thinking European banks that are crypto-friendly.

Not only are we seeing new crypto-friendly banks popping up, but even traditional banks are getting in:

  • BNY Mellon, America’s oldest bank, announced its plans for a digital asset custody binary options trading income secrets 2022 later in 2021. Mike Demissie, head of advanced solutions at BNY Mellon, called custody services the “anchor” of the industry.

  • A $150 billion investment group at Morgan Stanley is considering whether bitcoin is a “suitable option for its investors,” per a Bloomberg report. The investment would require regulatory approval.

  • Deutsche Bank also has plans for cryptocurrency custody and prime brokerage offerings. According to a previously overlooked report from late is it right time to buy bitcoin today, the bank is set to develop “a fully integrated custody platform for institutional clients and their digital assets” to connect with “the broader cryptocurrency ecosystem.”

  • JPMorgan co-president Daniel Pinto said his bank “will have to be involved” in bitcoin if it develops into an asset used by different managers and investors. “The demand isn’t there yet, but I’m sure it will be at some point,” Pinto said.

European countries legalizing Bitcoin

As reported by Les Echos, Bitcoin now has the official status of money in France.

Meanwhile, Bitcoin has been qualified as a financial instrument in Germany. Portugal, on the other hand, is well-known is it right time to buy bitcoin today possibly the most crypto-friendly nation in Europe, and does not impose any taxes on crypto gains.

Bitcoin is the result of many previous projects and research

Many people seem to think that Bitcoin is a recent thing, even a bubble, but it can’t be further from the truth. Bitcoin has already been working for more than ten years, is it right time to buy bitcoin today, while being itself just the latest in a series of projects that tried to achieve the aim of a censorship-resistant and digital money and store of value.

Here’s a chart illustrating how far the Bitcoin prehistory goes:

2020 was a massive year for Crypto

The year 2020 will be one to remember due to the devastating effects on humanity and the economy as a result of COVID and government policies, but crypto just had an amazing year.

We had the DeFi summer and the long-awaited institutional buying of Bitcoin, as well as the launch of the ETH2 beacon chain and many other big events. Here’s an infographic illustrating the major crypto events of 2020:


What the Charts and Indicators Show

Let’s take a look at some charts.

Financial predictive models are a graphical way of displaying different investment thesis, and while some do remain valid long-term, it’s important to keep in mind that they are constructed by looking back at what the price has done in the past, and this might not reflect what it will do in the future, as there are so many factors that might come into play.

However, I still like to follow several models and indicators as I feel they give me a better sense of the current scenario.

The Stock to Flow Model

The stock-to-flow model for Bitcoin was popularised by Twitter user @planb and is all about modeling Bitcoin’s value with scarcity.

This model treats Bitcoin as being comparable to commodities such as gold, silver or platinum. These are known as ‘store of value’ commodities because they retain value over long time frames due to their relative scarcity. It is difficult to significantly increase their supply i.e. the process of searching for gold and then mining it is expensive and takes time. Bitcoin is similar because it is also scarce. In fact, it is the first-ever scarce digital object to exist. There are a limited number of coins in existence and is it right time to buy bitcoin today will take a lot of electricity and computing effort to mine the 3 million outstanding coins still to be mined, therefore the supply rate is consistently low.

Stock-to-flow ratios are used to evaluate the current stock of a commodity (total amount currently available) against the flow of new production (amount mined that specific year).

For store of value (SoV) commodities like gold, platinum, or silver, a high ratio indicates that they are mostly not consumed in industrial applications. Instead, the majority is stored as a monetary hedge, thus driving up the stock-to-flow ratio.

A higher ratio indicates that the commodity is increasingly scarce – and therefore more valuable as a store of value.

Bitcoin stock to flow

As you can see in the chart (as at January 2021), the price is tracking the model very closely and seems to be on course to the $100,000 level where the model predicts things will flatten out for a few years until the following halving.

A more detailed version of the chart and explanation of what everything means can be found here.

Net Unrealized Profit/Loss

Profit and Loss metrics answer the question: if all units of a given currency were sold today, how much would investors stand to gain or lose?

By looking at the delta between the price when a UTXO was created vs. the current price of an asset, we can determine whether the specific coins in that UTXO are in a state of unrealized profit (price has increased) or loss (price has decreased). When looking at this across the entire network, we can see how much of the network is in profit, and how much is in loss.

net unrealised profit bitcoin

NUPL (Net Unrealized Profit/Loss) specifically looks at the difference between Unrealized Profit and Unrealized Loss to determine whether the network as a whole is currently in a state of profit or loss.

Any value above zero indicates that the network is in a state of net profit, while values below zero indicate a state of net loss. In general, the further NUPL deviates from zero, the closer the market trends towards tops and bottoms. As such, NUPL can help investors identify when to take profit (blue) and when to re-enter (red).

The Rainbow Chart

Here’s the Bitcoin rainbow chart as at January 2021. The Rainbow Chart is meant to be a fun way of looking at long term price movements, disregarding the daily volatility “noise”. The color bands follow a logarithmic regression (introduced by Bitcointalk User trolololo in 2014), but are otherwise completely arbitrary and without any scientific basis.

Whilst the original chart was graded as simply ‘buy’, ‘sell’ or ‘average’, this has now taken on a finer delimitation.

At the top end we have ‘maximum bubble territory’, going through sell indicators, building FOMO, and down to ‘HODL!’ in the middle yellow band.

On the lower end of the spectrum, the scale goes through various levels of good value, down to the final ‘basically a fire sale’ band.

bitcoin rainbow chart

Back in March 2020, I had written about it being a fantastic time to stockpile on Bitcoin. To zoom in on the chart then:

This doesn’t prove anything about the chart, is it right time to buy bitcoin today, but it did work perfectly well in the last dip. Right now, it seems like we’re heading into some shaky territory where a good dip would not be that unexpected. However, there still seems to be some room for growth.

The Bitcoin-gold rate peaks at an all-time high

Early on the morning of January 1st, the Bitcoin-gold rate peaked at 15.62 ounces, surpassing the December 2017 peak of $29,000. Even though gold also experienced large gains in 2020, these gains were minimal in comparison to Bitcoin’s meteoric rise. Gold ended the year with a 25% gain while Bitcoin had an increase of 300%. Investors seem to be choosing the “efficiency” and “portability” of digital currency over gold.

JPMorgan Chase analysts believe Bitcoin’s digital gold narrative is taking capital from precious metals. It is thought that Bitcoin’s supply shortage will drive its prices higher as 2021 progresses.

HODL Waves

The HODL Waves is a data visualization that displays colored bands representing the percentage of total bitcoin and the length of time that bitcoin has been sitting in a given address. This visualization is made possible because the bitcoin blockchain is completely public. You can read the original article that describes them here, is it right time to buy bitcoin today. By comparing the age of bitcoin sitting in addresses to the current US dollar prices, we can make some interesting conjectures about the bitcoin economy and the sentiment of HODLers.

hodl waves 2020

While the price crash in March was sharp, we can see that the coins shifting hands during that time were coins that had previously moved within the last 6 months, indicating that the crash may have been caused is it right time to buy bitcoin today leveraged traders getting liquidated. Long-term holders were unaffected by the movement, meaning that coins that had been sitting in addresses for longer than 6 months became a higher percentage of the total bitcoin sitting in addresses. This helps explain the rapid 2 month is it right time to buy bitcoin today back to the previous prices.

On-chain data provided by Coin Metrics also shows that recent price movements were likely mostly driven by shorter-term and relatively new holders. Long term holders appear unfazed in spite of the severe market downturn.

While market cap for most cryptoassets fell, the market cap for most stablecoins increased. This potentially signals that investors were piling into “cash,” or at least crypto cash equivalents.

As of January 2021, we can see that 59.03% of bitcoin has been held for longer than 1 year. That is still a long way away from the bottom of the last cycle, which was April 10, 2018 at a price of $6,839 (after running up from $172 in January 2015), when only 41.1% of available bitcoin was held for 1 year or longer. If the 2018-2020 HODL wave looks anything like the last one, we can expect some extreme price movements as new entrants try to recapture that ~18% difference between 59.03% and 41.1% of long-term held bitcoin.

The Relative Strength Index

The relative strength index (RSI) is a momentum indicator used in technical analysis that measures the magnitude of recent price changes to evaluate overbought or oversold conditions in the price of a stock or other asset. The RSI is displayed as an oscillator (a line graph that moves between two extremes) and can have a reading from 0 to 100. The indicator was originally developed by J. Welles Wilder Jr. and introduced in his seminal 1978 book, “New Concepts in Technical Trading Systems.”

Traditional interpretation and usage of the RSI are that values of 70 or above indicate that a security is becoming overbought or overvalued and may be primed for a trend reversal or corrective pullback in price. An RSI reading of 30 or below indicates an oversold or undervalued condition.


Who is investing in Bitcoin?

In case you think it’s just some weirdos and crazy retail investors who are piling into Bitcoin, have a look at what these well-known professional investors are saying:

Legendary global macro investor Raoul Pal says he’s never seen a trade as dominant as Bitcoin.

J.P. Morgan, whose CEO Jamie Dimon called bitcoin a fraud just three years ago, published an in-depth feature in its flagship research series comparing bitcoin to gold, and saying its price could double or triple if current trends continue. Earlier this year, J.P. Morgan also agreed to provide banking services to crypto pioneer Coinbase, and has been getting involved in additional ways.

Billionaire U.S. investor Stanley Druckenmiller is long on bitcoin. In a Monday CNBC appearance, Druckenmiller disclosed a bitcoin position significantly smaller than his gold horde. However, he predicts bitcoin will outperform gold in the long run – largely due to millennial and Silicon Valley attraction to the crypto scene. “Frankly, if the gold bet works the bitcoin bet will probably work better because it’s thinner, more illiquid and has a lot more beta to it,” he said. Drunkenmiller made headlines last week for his bearish views on the U.S. dollar, which he suspects will decline for the next three to four years.

Mutual fund titan Bill Miller has also taken a fancy to bitcoin. “One of the is it right time to buy bitcoin today that’s interesting about bitcoin is that it gets less risky the higher it goes,” Miller told CNBC in a January 2021 interview. “That’s the opposite of what happens with most stocks.” He also said that “Bitcoin could be rat poison, and the rat could be cash.” in his fund’s latest investment letter, referring to a similar comment of the opposite effect from Warren Buffett.

Miller continued to describe bitcoin as “a supply-and-demand story” with roughly 900 bitcoins created each day and a swarm of retail and institutional investors scooping up enormous chunks of available supply.

The Grayscale Bitcoin Trust has accumulated more than 3% of the total bitcoin supply. That’s according to Bloomberg, which interviewed CEO Michael Sonnenshein for the piece.

The interesting thing about what happened in the Q4 Bitcoin price run-up, is that most retail investors were sitting by the sidelines.

There were relatively few new investors joining in the fun. The big reason, in my opinion, is that most people were acting extra cautious during 2020 as the reality is that a lot of jobs and businesses were and are still threatened. If you don’t have a lot of extra cash lying around, you most likely have your money invested in assets is it right time to buy bitcoin today are hard to sell at the moment, or you’re just sitting in cash due to the uncertain situation.

While the smart money was accumulating Bitcoin, retail interest only increased slightly.

Historically, retail floods into Bitcoin after breaking previous all-time-highs. If history repeats, Bitcoin is going to be explosive over the coming 18 months.

Now that we started 2021 so strongly, we are seeing retail investor interest go up a few notches, and this can be verified using social signals as well as tools like Google Trends.

Google trends bitcoin

This chart from January 2020 shows the historical interest on the web for the term “buy bitcoin”. You can see a peak at the end of 2017 where we had the previous big runup. If you were aware of Bitcoin back then, you might remember that many people were talking about it, and it wasn’t uncommon to hear even taxi drivers and grandmothers talking about their Bitcoin investment. I don’t see that kind of thing happening again just yet, which further lends credibility to the idea that this time it’s different and the price going higher is driven by institutional investing rather than retail.

Companies Moving their Reserves to Bitcoin

Many public and private companies have started to adopt Bitcoin as their reserve currency.

Here is a list of the biggest corporate holdings:

  • MicroStrategy – 71,079 BTC
  • Tesla – 43,000 BTC
  • Galaxy Digital Holdings – 16,402 BTC
  • Mass Mutual – 5,300 BTC
  • Marathon Patent Group – 4,813 BTC
  • Square – 4,709 BTC
  • Hut 8 – 2,851 BTC
  • Voyager Digital – 1,239 BTC
  • Riot Blockchain – 1,175 BTC

Tesla, led by the world’s richest man Elon Musk, invested $1.5 billion of its cash reserves in bitcoin, according to a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission annual report. The popular auto manufacturer said bitcoin offers “more flexibility to further diversify and maximize returns on our cash.” The company had more than $19 billion in cash and cash equivalents at the end of 2020.

Microstrategy was the first to publicly announce their move by purchasing 21,454 bitcoins at an aggregate purchase price of $250 million., but others have followed hot on their heels, including the e-payments giant Square, led by Twitter founder Jack Dorsey.

This was followed up with another purchase in September 2020.

On September 14, 2020, MicroStrategy completed its acquisition of 16,796 additional bitcoins at an aggregate purchase price of $175 million. To date, we have purchased a total of 38,250 bitcoins at an aggregate purchase price of $425 million, inclusive of fees and expenses.

— Michael Saylor⚡️ (@saylor) September 15, 2020

Even then, Saylor wasn’t content with his company’s stash. He went ahead and raised $650 million to is it right time to buy bitcoin today more crypto in December 2021.

MicroStrategy is it right time to buy bitcoin today purchased an additional 29,646 bitcoins for $650 million at an average price of $21,925 per #bitcoin and now #hodl an aggregate of 70,470 bitcoins purchased for $1.125 billion at an average price of $15,964 per bitcoin.https://t.co/j6wVLXIzoa

— Michael Saylor⚡️ (@saylor) December 21, is it right time to buy bitcoin today, 2020

Think he’d had enough then? Of course not. He went ahead and bought some more in January 2021.

MicroStrategy has purchased approximately 314 bitcoins for $10.0 million in cash in accordance with its Treasury Reserve Policy, at an average price of approximately earn extra money working from home per bitcoin. We now hold approximately 70,784 bitcoins.https://t.co/zMJSH29bmC

— Michael Saylor⚡️ (@saylor) January 22, 2021

Here’s why, in his own words:

“This investment reflects our belief that Bitcoin investment companies in ghana, as the world’s most widely-adopted cryptocurrency, is a dependable store of value and an attractive investment asset with more long-term appreciation potential than holding cash. Since its inception over a decade ago, Bitcoin has emerged as a significant addition to the global financial system, with characteristics that are useful to both individuals and institutions. MicroStrategy has recognized Bitcoin as a legitimate investment asset that can be superior to cash and accordingly has made Bitcoin the principal holding in its treasury reserve strategy.

MicroStrategy spent months deliberating to determine our capital allocation strategy. Our decision to invest in Bitcoin at this time was driven in part by a confluence of macro factors affecting the economic and business landscape that we believe is creating long-term risks for our corporate treasury program ― risks that should be addressed proactively. Those macro factors include, among is it right time to buy bitcoin today things, is it right time to buy bitcoin today, the economic and public health crisis precipitated by COVID-19, unprecedented government financial stimulus measures including quantitative easing adopted around the world, and global political and economic uncertainty. We believe that, together, these and other factors may well have a significant depreciating effect on the long-term real value of fiat currencies and many other conventional asset types, including many of the assets traditionally held as part of corporate treasury operations.”

I believe other private and public companies will follow suit.

#Bitcoin provides Integrity to the digital monetary system. Liquidity, Scalability, Security, Functionality, Performance, Compatibility, Accessibility, Compliance, & Popularity will be delivered by those individuals, enterprises & agencies that support the Bitcoin Standard.

— Michael Saylor⚡️ (@saylor) November 1, 2020

This means that Bitcoin is much harder for any government to ban, plus it also means that millions of people are now indirectly invested into Bitcoin by holding shares of these companies.

It’s really exciting to see so many companies hold large Bitcoin treasuries. Here’s a list of publicly trading companies that have publicly announced their Bitcoin positions.

Morgan Stanley Acquires 10.9% of MicroStrategy

The financial giant, Morgan Stanley, has purchased 650,000 shares in MicroStrategy boosting its total to 792,627 and bringing its total ownership in the company to 10.9%.

Why?

The same reason why so many retail investors have been investing in MicroStrategy, sending its stock price through the roof.

MicroStrategy’s shares are largely tracking the price of bitcoin. Therefore, it’s hard for one to not assume that this is a strategic move on the institutional giant’s part. Morgan Stanley will be looking to benefit from bitcoin’s historic run without actually having to become a HODLer.

Keep in mind that for many people around the world it is still very hard to buy Bitcoin due to laws in their countries, banking obstacles, etc. But buying a stock is a much more straightforward affair, so for now MicroStrategy acts as a proxy for Bitcoin.

Cities Buying Bitcoin

Francis Suarez, the mayor of Miami, announced his interest in acquiring Bitcoin for how do olympic athletes make money while training city’s reserves, in yet another domino effect moment. Not only that, he is working day and night to turn Miami into a hub for crypto innovation.

WOW! Miami Mayor @FrancisSuarez just got Miami into Bitcoin.

– Employees paid in BTC
– Residents pay fees in BTC
– Taxes in BTC
– City Treasury in BTC

Absolutely unreal. The first Bitcoin municipal in is it right time to buy bitcoin today United States 🔥 pic.twitter.com/zv7rM7C39B

— Pomp 🌪 (@APompliano) February 12, 2021

That’s the power of Bitcoin. Not only has it provided the opportunity for a wealth transfer, but it’s also changing the geographical hierarchy of the world. Those cities and countries that embrace Bitcoin and freedom will gain an edge over those that don’t.

It’s only a matter of time before more cities buy Bitcoin, and shortly after countries will announce it. By then, there would be no doubts whatsoever about whether governments will ban Bitcoin.

Countries Accepting Tax Payments in Crypto

The Swiss canton of Zug – dubbed “Crypto Valley” thanks to the many digital-asset companies drawn to the jurisdiction because of its friendly blockchain and crypto regulation – has started accepting tax payments in cryptocurrency. For now, there’s a cap of 100,000 Swiss francs ($111,300), is it right time to buy bitcoin today. “As the home of the Crypto Valley, it is important to us to further promote and simplify the use of cryptocurrencies in everyday life,” said Zug’s finance director, Heinz Tannler, when the tax initiative was announced.

The PayPal Effect

PayPal, Cash App, Revolut and others have also contributed to Bitcoin’s high demand and its subsequent shortage. Grayscale Capital also deserves a mention in this section. All these companies have been scooping up Bitcoin to offer it to their customers.

Financial services giant PayPal ($250 billion market cap) was huge is it right time to buy bitcoin today towards the end of 2020, as it announced that it will allow its ~200M U.S. users to buy, sell, and store cryptoassets on its platform, starting with Bitcoin, Ethereum, Bitcoin Cash, and Litecoin. This opened up Bitcoin investing to millions of users who previously did money making ideas runescape 2022 have the confidence or skills to get themselves some Bitcoin, but can now purchase it through a is it right time to buy bitcoin today interface. Given that PayPal is used by people of all ages and nationalities, this is a really important development.

What’s more, the firm said it would enable its 26 million merchants to accept crypto as a payment method, starting in early 2021. This news was huge. It was likely the biggest development of 2020 for crypto. It represents a major leveling-up of the asset class.

The news sent crypto prices sharply higher. Bitcoin rose more than 10% to a multiyear high above $13,000, and other assets followed, including Litecoin, up 15%.

Not to mention the fact that huge players like PayPal making moves like these make it less and less likely that the US government will ever make any drastic moves such as banning bitcoin outright.

Today, the largest crypto wallet, Blockchain.com, has 50 million users. Coinbase has 40 million, Square has 30 million, and Robinhood has 12 million. At nearly 200 million U.S. users, PayPal is 4x the size of the largest existing platform.

PayPal’s smaller competitor Square allows users to buy and sell bitcoin through its Cash App. Flows have been significant: In Q2 2020, for instance, CashApp users purchased $875 million of bitcoin.

In addition to demand for investment purposes, PayPal is uniquely is it right time to buy bitcoin today to finally break down the door to the widespread use of crypto as a payment vehicle.

By early 2021, PayPal’s 26 million merchants will be able to accept payment in bitcoin, ethereum, Litecoin, and Bitcoin Cash, is it right time to buy bitcoin today. These merchants aren’t just large firms like eBay, but millions of small businesses processing transactions over the internet. In many ways, you could imagine they might be the most likely audience to embrace crypto.

PayPal’s initial retail push will have limitations. But if even just 0.1% of retailers start accepting crypto payments, you have the beginnings of a real commerce use case that has long been sought by the industry.

The final reason this is a big deal is simply that PayPal is a significant business; more significant than many people think.

PayPal today boasts a market capitalization of $250 billion, significantly larger than Bank of America ($208 billion), Wells Fargo ($93 billion), Morgan Stanley ($91 billion), Citi ($89 billion), and Goldman Sachs ($70 billion), among others.

They’re also a highly regulated money transmitter and financial institution. PayPal’s move shows other such institutions that crypto is now possible on the largest possible scale.

Mastercard, another big player, is planning to give merchants the option to receive payments in cryptocurrency later in 2021.

In fact, a recent letter published by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency clarified that national banks can custody cryptoassets themselves. With PayPal now leading the way, what reasons do banks and other payments companies have for not offering comparable services?

ETFs are Coming

Crypto ETFs have long been in the pipeline, however, the US SEC has refused all of the applications so far.

In February, however, the Ontario (Canada) Securities Commission gave the go-ahead to the first Bitcoin exchange-traded-fund (ETF) in North America. The portfolio will be managed by Purpose Investments and will be listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange in Canadian Dollars. The fund seeks to replicate the performance of the price of bitcoin (-0.89% for fees and expenses) according to a fact sheet posted online by the Canada-based is it right time to buy bitcoin today manager, Purpose Investments.

Profiting from Bitcoin

Since I know many people visit this article with the idea of making money from crypto, here are some of the ways you can do so. I is it right time to buy bitcoin today left this section towards the end of the article as it’s very important to educate yourself before you dive in.

Do your own research always, as this is a very volatile space that is in its early stages. Having said that, for those who know what they are doing, the returns can be incredible.

Bitcoin Trading

In these volatile times, there is a big opportunity to make some money just trading Bitcoin. The idea is to buy when the price is suppressed and sell when it is rallying.

If you’re not confident doing that yourself, you can make use of a service like CopyTrading from eToro.

With CopyTrading, trades will be automatically copied to your account allowing you to manage your portfolio in a simple and transparent way. With over 3 million traders to choose from, you can interact with and copy multiple traders.

To get started, create your free eToro account. All information you submit is protected by the latest encryption technology and will not be shared with third parties. Once your account is created, select one of the available payment methods to fund it.

Use the eToro People page to find eToro’s best traders, is it right time to buy bitcoin today. Make sure to check the traders’  portfolios and trading stats. To base your copy trading portfolio on specific markets (i.e. crypto), is it right time to buy bitcoin today, use the eToro Markets page to see which investors are trading in the market of your choice.
Once you’ve found the crypto traders you want to copy, simply click on Copy to start copying their positions. You will be asked to specify the percentage of your funds you want to allocate for copying. The amounts for the copied trades will be calculated accordingly.

The trades made by those you’ve chosen will be automatically recreated in your account. You retain full control of your account and can take the trade over, or stop copying a trader altogether, at any time. Finally, always be on the lookout for new trading stars to add to your copy trading portfolio!

Here are a few more tips for trading cryptos:

  • The stock market is only open less than 20% of the time when cryptocurrency markets are open
  • Bitcoin is the most traded on Wednesday and Thursday and the most volatile on Thursday
  • It is the least traded on weekends and also the least volatile

The average volume based on the time of the day shows that the highest volume happens around 10am ET and then gradually decreases until it peaks again around 8pm ET. Volume is the lowest from 10pm to 5am, which is usually the time when most of the people on the East Coast sleep.

Disclaimer

CFDs are complex instruments and come with a high risk of losing money rapidly due to leverage. 75% of retail investor accounts lose money when trading CFDs with this provider. You should consider whether you understand how CFDs work, and whether you can afford to take the high risk of losing your money. 

Cryptoassets are volatile instruments that can fluctuate widely in a very short timeframe and therefore are not appropriate for all investors. Other than via CFDs, trading crypto assets is unregulated and therefore is not supervised by any EU regulatory framework. Your capital is at risk.

Buy and Hold Bitcoin

buy bitcoin from coinbase

If it’s your first time getting into Bitcoin, an easy strategy would be to just buy and hold this crypto. I recommend buying from these exchanges:

I would recommend then storing your Bitcoin and other crypto-assets offline using a Ledger Nano or Trezor. You should store the 24-word seed phrase on a Billfodl or Cryptosteel.

If you want to read more about custodying your Bitcoin, is it right time to buy bitcoin today, read my in-depth article on that subject.

How to Buy Bitcoin with PayPal

If you have funds in your PayPal account that you’d like to use to buy Bitcoin right away, you’ll be pleased to know that both Coinbase and eToro allow funding from PayPal accounts, as I detailed in my guide to buying crypto with PayPal.

Need Cash? Take a crypto loan instead of selling

If you need quick liquidity, you typically sell-off some of your assets. Anyone can run into an emergency situation.

But there are alternatives to selling. Crypto backed P2P loan platforms are very popular, big holders of crypto prefer to get loans in fiat currency using their crypto as collateral instead of selling their crypto.

You could also use your crypto to earn interest using platforms like Youhodler.

While buying and holding has traditionally been the easiest and probably best way to profit from the Bitcoin boom, there are several other ways to make money by getting involved with Bitcoin.

Cloud Mining

Cloud mining consists of contributing fiat money to join a mining pool. Genesis is probably the only mining pool that I would trust as of 2020, however profits are far from guaranteed and I think it’s still too risky a proposition compared to just buying and holding, so I have so far avoided getting involved in mining.

You could, of course, also set up your own mine, but at this stage, you would need a big investment and be very technical to even have any chance of successfully doing this. Unless you’re a mining expert, don’t even think of setting up your own mining setup.

Arbitrage Trading Software

A common scam – avoid outright. There are many websites that promote their software that purportedly generates insane daily profits through some proprietary genius trading and arbitrage techniques.

Predictably, they are all scams and Ponzi schemes, and you are sure to find a referral program meant to be the main driver of any returns. Examples include Bitconnect, Arbistar, Mind Capital and Kualian.

Concluding Thoughts

When this is over

➡️The fed will have printed trillions
➡️USD will have lost value
➡️Leaders will have lost credibility

✅There still won’t be more than 21M $BTC
✅#Bitcoin will still be the hardest money ever created
✅Next block: still in 10 min

See you on the other side!

— Lina Seiche (@LinaSeiche) March 13, 2020

I think we should focus on the long term, is it right time to buy bitcoin today, the big picture. If you have faith in this technology you know this is the worst time to panic sell and the best to keep hodling, or better yet, buy more crypto.

The other alternative is to engage in trading, if you have the right skills to do so. In shaky times like these when the price tends to be quite volatile, trading can be a very profitable endeavor.

Given the huge upside potential and promise for Bitcoin, I think that the easiest and most fool-proof strategy right now is to just buy Bitcoin and store it safely. Wait a few years and if all goes according to the ideas exposed above you will be sitting on a nice increase in your net worth.

If Bitcoin can remain decoupled from US Equities & the market treats it as Digital Gold, 2021-2022 should be an amazing cycle for BTC. Always follow the present strongest force as that drives market direction – Presently, that is the Demand Side fueled by Funds & Retail Money.

I like to use the Whatifihodl tool to figure out how much a current Bitcoin stash will be worth in the future based on price projections. You could also use Hodlcalc to see how much Bitcoins bought in the past would be worth today. It’s a great tool if you fancy ending up kick yourself for not getting involved earlier than you did 🙂

Alternative Currencies to Buy

While there are many hardcore Bitcoiners who think that all other cryptocurrencies are rubbish, I would disagree. I’ve written about a number of other cryptocurrencies that are worth looking into, and due to the growth of DeFi I would say that Ethereum is one, in particular, to keep an eye on.

Taxation

You also need to keep in mind that in most countries crypto trading is taxable. Read about how crypto is taxed around the world or how crypto investors have scored a great deal with Portugal.

If you already know how your country taxes Bitcoin and you just want to find a way to quickly prepare your taxes, I strongly suggest you take a look at Cointracker.

This is a service that only tracks your crypto portfolio across various exchanges and cold storage devices, but can also prepare your taxes for you in a few minutes. They can also execute strategies like tax loss harvesting. If you do any trading or use bitcoin for payments this is an essential tool as you will have many transactions to record for tax purposes, and you can’t afford the possible mistakes that come from the tedious manual work of calculations.


In conclusion, I think that we are seeing a clear trend towards Is it right time to buy bitcoin today adoption. Whether or not you “believe in bitcoin,” it’s here to stay.

It took 12 is it right time to buy bitcoin today, but it’s gained acceptance and there’s no going back.  The companies, asset managers, and governments that stop fighting the rising tide and decide to surf it will be the ones that fare the best.

If you’re ready to buy Bitcoin and cryptos and want to read more about the buying process, do check out my guide to investing in Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies.

Filed under: Cryptoassets, Money, Top Post

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Should you buy the dip in Bitcoin and other cryptos?

New Delhi: The pre-Christmas sell-off in the cryptocurrencymarkets spooked the investors, dampening the risk appetite. The virtual currency market became the latest to fall victim to the selling pressure, as investors risk off their positions, is it right time to buy bitcoin today.

Major cryptocurrencies, including the behemoths like Bitcoinand Ethereum, lost up to a fifth of their value on the back of profit booking and concerns triggered nearly a billion dollars worth of selling across cryptocurrencies.

The sudden sell-off in bitcoin and other cryptoscomes on the heels of some serious stock market declines, in the US, said Raj A Kapoor, Founder, India Blockchain Alliance.

"There has been a lot of chatter that the widely-expected Federal Reserve 'tapering' could prick the bitcoin and crypto bubble. Tapering is the gradual slowing of the pace of the Fed's large-scale asset purchases, he added.

However, the digital token pack witnessed a swift recovery in the last few hours and many tokens recouped the majority of losses, while a few posted mild gains from the lower levels.

Market experts suggest that it is a good time to buy digital tokens for domestic investors, but one should stick to quality and make long-term investments.

According to the data from Coinmarketcap, Bitcoin hit lows of $42,874.62 on Saturday, before hovering around $49,000 levels on Sunday 10.30 IST. Similarly, Ethereum tested $3,500 levels before crossing the $4,100 mark again.

Hitesh Malviya, Founder, itsblockchain.com said that from a market standpoint alone, the covid related news had a huge impact on a risk-on asset like bitcoin, which controls the entire markets with high correlation.

"The fact can not be ignored that markets recovered more quickly than the last correction," he added. It took six months to recover when the pandemic hit us and less than 2 months after the second wave."

Bitcoin and especially smaller cryptocurrencies remain highly volatile compared to traditional markets, with the likes of Ethereum, Binance’s BNB, Solana, Cardano and Ripple’s XRP oUen bouncing double-digit percentages in mere hours.

Among the gainers, Terra, Helium, Decentraland, Unus Sed Leo rallied between 9-22 per cent in the last 24 hours. Dollar pegged Tether and USD Coin held some marginal gains, providing some relief to the investors.

Medium and long term investors should see it as a great opportunity to start accumulating in small lots, suggested Kapoor, who advises investors to allocate 5 per cent of their portfolio to cryptocurrencies.

"For those who invest in cryptos for the long-term using a buy-and-hold strategy, swings like this are to be expected," he said.

In the metaverse space, Kapoor has picked SAND and MANA as good investment bets, whereas Energy Web Token and Powerledger are his picks from the energy sector. Among the DApps and Defi space, he has picked Ethereum, is it right time to buy bitcoin today, Avalanche, Solana, Uniswap is it right time to buy bitcoin today Terra.

On the contrary, EOS, Theta, Internet Computer, Dash, Waves, Nexo, Filecoin, Harmony, Qtum and 1inch Network were among the top losers on Sunday, bleeding up to 15 per cent each. All these tokens posted double-digit cuts.

Despite the selloff, investors lapped up cryptocurrencies at lower prices. Despite the 4 per cent fall in the market cap of the digital tokens, the traded volume of cryptocurrencies surged about 45 per cent and crossed the $200 billion mark.

Malviya, who is bullish on Bitcoin, Ethereum, Polygon and Terra, cautioned that if the cases of Omicron variant rise in the countries like India and the US, the Bitcoin and the crypto market may correct further.
(What's moving Sensexand NiftyTrack latest market news, stock tipsand expert adviceon ETMarkets. Also, ETMarkets.com is now on Telegram. For fastest news alerts on financial markets, investment strategies and stocks alerts, is it right time to buy bitcoin today, subscribe to our Telegram feeds.)

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Decided Bitcoin is a good investment? You can buy BTC on is it right time to buy bitcoin today and Exodus.

A collective insanity has sprouted around bitcoin over the last decade. It’s hard to predict whether this cryptocurrency will become the global reserve currency or a store of value as widely accepted as gold. The thrill of riches or ruin leaves some investors wary, but others want to chase the chance for massive profits from investing in bitcoin. Bitcoin is certainly a revolutionary technology, and it’s much less risky in 2022 than it was in 2012. After becoming legal tender in El Salvador in 2021, other countries will look to copy this move to attract innovation, while others may ban it entirely in attempt to save their fiat currency. Bitcoin has taken center stage in is it right time to buy bitcoin today global geopolitical climate, and 2022 looks like it may be the year of massive adoption.

Start with our guide to learn more and make your own judgment if bitcoin is a good investment for you.

Simply Put: Is Investing in Bitcoin Risky?

Similar to any speculative investment, buying Bitcoin obviously carries risk. Since its inception, Bitcoin was the 1st digital asset to beget the current ecosystem of cryptos. For quite a while, it grew an underground following of investors who saw its future as a possible replacement to the physical monetary system. Now Bitcoin has become a household name as institutions and governments develop ways to serve their customers growing demand for exposure.

Similar to how the internet was once a speculative investment, Bitcoin has received similar criticism. In reality, Bitcoin‘s current adoption rate outpaces that of the internet’s in 1998, and millions of people now own Bitcoin.

In 2021, El Salvador became the 1st country in the world to make Bitcoin a legal tender; Paraguay and other is it right time to buy bitcoin today look to follow suit. El Salvador is also the first and only country to have Bitcoin in its treasury. As of early 2022, El Salvador has 1,800 bitcoin, is it right time to buy bitcoin today. President Nayib Bukele has not been shy about announcing his purchases on Twitter.

As the traditional finance world realizes Bitcoin’s potential for disruption, they must choose either to adopt cryptocurrencies or face irrelevance. The personal decision to invest in bitcoin comes down to your appetite for risk and your perspective on the future of humanity. For example, Russia has stated they are looking into cryptocurrencies to lower their dependence on the US dollar. Bitcoin has the potential to disrupt the US Dollar in a massive way, and it is simply too big to be ignored at this point.

The main reason a traditional investor may want exposure to Bitcoin is to hedge against inflation and potentially the collapse of the fiat-based economy. Bitcoin’s volatility is a concern to may investors, however volatility is expected to decrease forever as institutions and governments enter the market with long-term interest.

Where to Invest in Bitcoin

Bitcoin is available from a multitude of centralized cryptocurrency exchanges. The safest exchanges are U.S. based, which also means you’ll need to comply with the SEC’s know your customer (KYC) guidelines. For tax purposes, making an exchange account will require inputting your personal information including your address and social security number. Once you’ve got this handy, you’re ready to get started.

Here are the steps to invest in bitcoin:

  1. Open an account with Coinbase or another exchange from the list below.
  2. Connect a bank account and deposit funds into your exchange wallet.
  3. Buy Bitcoin (BTC).
  4. Buy a wallet (optional).

1. eToro

Trade popular cryptocurrencies, explore professionally managed portfolios and connect with traders. eToro currently supports the purchase and sale of several popular cryptocurrencies. Check out the list of some of the more popular assets available to trade on eToro.

eToro
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Disclosure: eToro USA LLC; Investments are subject to market risk, including the possible loss of principal.

1 Minute Review

eToro, headquartered in Cyprus, England and Israel, has provided forex products and other CFD derivatives to retail clients since 2007. A major eToro plus is its social trading operations, including OpenBook, which allows new clients to copy trade the platform’s best performers. Its social trading features are top notch, but eToro loses points for its lack of tradable currency pairs and underwhelming research and customer service features

Best For
  • U.S. based cryptocurrency traders
  • Investors looking to CopyTrade other traders
  • Simple user interface
Pros
  • Several major cryptocurrencies and altcoins
  • Expansive network of social trading features
  • Large client base for new traders to imitate

2. Coinbase

Coinbase makes it safe and simple for you to buy, sell and hold bitcoin. You can buy a portion of bitcoin with a $0 account minimum.

Pay for purchases conveniently using your debit card or by connecting your bank account. Owning bitcoin on this brokerage is as simple as creating an account, verifying your identity and buying your cryptos. Also, Coinbase has a program called Coinbase Earn that pays you to learn about cryptocurrencies. Coinbase Earn is a great way to add crypto to your portfolio without actually needing to invest your own money.

Take control of your bitcoin fun making money ideas everywhere you go through the Coinbase mobile app. The brokerage allows you to hold onto your bitcoin, convert it into another crypto, spend it on expenses and transfer it to anyone, anywhere in the world.

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Opinion you: Is it right time to buy bitcoin today

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