What is a Bitcoin
What Is A Bitcoin?
Don’t worry if you don’t know too much about Bitcoin. It was little known when it first got started in back 2010. It wasn’t until mid 2013 when it shot up from a few cents to more than US$ 1,000 which was it’s first claim to fame.
Still, by 2015, very few people owned any Bitcoin and the price had receded to around US$ 300 and stayed there for more than a year and the total market at that time was only about $4.4 billion.
It’s only in 2016 that the price of a single Bitcoin had slowly risen to around $700 jumping to $1,200 in early 2017. But from there it has quickly risen, massively, to more than $7,000 in October and November, capturing global attention and stunning investors.
Then it hit $8,000 went past $9,000 and then exceeded $10,000+…
Which is pretty amazing right!
“In fact that’s so astounding that there has never been anything like it before!
Overall the price has risen almost 75,000,000 percent since its inception eight years ago.
You can see todays Price here;
The total market is now around $300 Billion, which is significant, as is the daily trade volume. But what’s really interesting is it’s about to get a whole lot bigger.
Why?
- For one, Bitcoin recently broke through US$ 11,000+ per coin and that created a lot of global attention, now everyones talking about Bitcoin.
- Two; Limited Supply – There are only Twenty-One million Bitcoins. Ensuring that’s it value will rise as demand and interest continues to grow.
- And three; Institutional Investors don’t yet own Bitcoin.
Institutional Investors
Institutional investors are hedge funds, big money managers, sovereign wealth funds with billions of dollars to invest. Usually these big money investors are the first to invest in ground breaking technologies, but with Bitcoin it’s been different.
As institutional investors collectively manage trillions of dollars it shuts them out of any market that is too small ($100 Billion or so) and also they need to be able to hedge their bets. So until now institutional investors haven’t been able to do that with Bitcoin.
But that’s about to change, because the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) has recently given the go-ahead for the two big Chicago-based derivatives exchanges to launch Bitcoin futures trading. Opening the door for institutional investors to begin investing and that will send billions, perhaps even trillions of dollars, flowing into Bitcoin.
Limited Supply
There are only 21 million bitcoins that will ever exist and 16.7 Million of those coins have already been mined. Meaning that nearly 80% of Bitcoin’s total supply is already in circulation.
The rest will slowly enter the market over the next 123 years. Ensuring that’s it value will continue to rise as the demand begins to exceed supply.
To put Bitcoins ‘limited supply‘ into perspective, there are some Thirty-five million, US millionaires, but there are only, twenty-one million Bitcoins, so not every millionaire can own a Bitcoin.