Over the very long-term, no asset class has been more successful at making investors richer than the stock market.
Since the coronavirus pandemic trough for equities in March 2020, the broad-based S&P 500 has returned a little over 100%.
Dogecoin, which also derives its inspiration from the Japanese Shiba Inu dog breed, gained more than 27,000% in a six-month stretch between early November 2020 and early May 2021.
If we make the hypothetical assumption that there were no transaction fees, a $100 investment on its debut day could have purchased 125,000 Bitcoin.
An initial $100 investment held for a tad over 11 years and four months has gained almost 8,000,000,000% and would now be worth $7,964,042,400.
To put this into another context, Tesla Motors’ CEO Elon Musk is currently the world’s richest person, with an estimated net worth of $281.6 billion.
Since Bitcoin is mined and the block rewards associated with transaction validation halve every four years, the full 21 million tokens won’t be in circulation until sometime around the year 2140.
To build on this point, Bitcoin is often viewed as an inflationary hedge to what’s been a free-wheeling Federal Reserve.
For example, El Salvador became the first country to legalize Bitcoin as tender, as of Sept.
Over 76 million people around the world, including 46 million in the U.S., have a unique wallet that contains Bitcoin, as of August 2021.
Taproot will boost Bitcoin’s privacy, allow for complex transactions at a cheaper cost, and combine multi-signatures transactions into one, which’ll reduce data stored on the blockchain and help scale the network.
A physical commodity, such as gold, is limited to what’s already been dug up from the ground and what remains to be mined on Earth.
If businesses were looking for a blockchain-based use case that would improve existing payment infrastructure, Bitcoin would be way down the list of long-term candidates.
Rather, I’m speaking to the hundreds of new coins and blockchain projects being introduced on a weekly basis.
But with the number of derivative listings for Bitcoin growing, it’s providing a means for big money to bet against the world’s largest digital currency.
It’s simply to point out that the big gains in Bitcoin will likely prove fleeting as the enterprise shift to blockchain takes longer than expected.