Generally speaking, I’m not a fan of Bitcoin as an investment, but there’s no disputing that those who have been able to timing their purchases and sales well have earned some substantial gains.
Bitcoin, for example, has gained 7.3 percent in the previous month, and if you’d been able to time the October jump perfectly, you might have earned a rapid 30 percent profit in a matter of minutes. So, am I being too critical of cryptocurrencies, and are there any compelling reasons for me to invest in Bitcoin? If… I may be able to accomplish it.
No question, individuals all over the globe like gambling, yet the odds of winning at commercial gambling establishments are strongly stacked against the gambler. Do you want to place a bet on the horses? The odds are set up in such a way that, regardless of who wins in the short term, it is the bookmakers who earn the most money in the long run.
What about a card’s face up or a roll of the dice? What do you think? Again, the deck is loaded in the favor of the house, and it is there that the large profit margins are generated.
Bitcoin, on the other hand, is not like that, and it is dangerously near to presenting a zero-sum contract. That is, with the exception of a modest brokerage fee and a little spread, the majority of the earnings and losses are borne by the gamblers themselves. As a result, bettors may expect to retain a greater portion of their winnings overall than they would with most other commercial forms of gambling. Even when contrasted to the volatile nature of cryptocurrencies, it is possible to see traditional currencies depreciating at exorbitant rates when they are controlled by financially inept governments, which may seem impossible to believe.
A considerable number of individuals in Venezuela, for example, were placing their assets into Bitcoin in order to protect themselves against hyperinflation at the time of writing. In the event that Bitcoin drops by 50% over the next 12 months, you’d still be better off than if you continued to live with the 130,000 percent inflation rate that Venezuelans experienced in 2018.
Moreover, when compared to Zimbabweans during that country’s greatest hyper-inflation era, Venezuelans had it easy — annual inflation in Zimbabwe peaked at an estimated 89.7 sextillion percent in 2008, according to official figures. Unfortunately for Zimbabweans, there was no Bitcoin to assist them at the time.
However, with inflation in the United Kingdom at around 2%, I really don’t need bitcoins for this reason. Perhaps a little facetious, but not entirely, because I’ve known people who have amassed so much wealth that they’ve treated the process of distributing it almost as a sport – something akin to Brewster’s Millions, in which the protagonist must dispose of a large fortune in order to inherit an even larger one.
So, sure, if you had money to throw away, I believe that purchasing Bitcoin and keeping it for the next 10 years (if it lives that long) should suffice — however, if I were ever in that situation, I would donate it to more worthy charities.
Now, I’m not in any of these scenarios, and it’s quite improbable that I will be in any of them in the future. Instead, I’m merely putting money into little investments to help me supplement my income once I retire. And for that reason, I’m not willing to gamble my money on something as dangerous as Bitcoin. No, I believe that investing my money into the finest dividend-paying FTSE 100 firms will continue to be the greatest investment available in the long run. Of course, finding the correct stocks and developing a winning strategy in the stock market are not simple tasks to do. However, you can get a leg up on the competition by downloading the Motley Fool’s FREE book, “10 Steps To Making A Million In The Stock Market.”