Forever is a long time. When you want to create lasting wealth for the rest of your life and for your heirs, you’re looking for ultra-trusted value builders. I remember gold. Real estate bonds are another option. Some stocks may work, but you need to make sure that the companies you choose can last for decades.
You can add these days Bitcoin (BTC -0.81%) to this exclusive list. Yes it is true. A small handful of top-tier cryptocurrencies can challenge gold and real estate when it comes to protecting your hard-earned wealth over the long term, and Bitcoin remains the king of the hill it created in 2009.
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Bitcoin was created for this purpose
Bitcoin was always meant to handle this business.
The original white paper, which describes Bitcoin’s inner workings and long-term goals, openly compares the system to gold.
The document states that “the constant addition of a constant amount of new coins is the same as gold miners expending resources to add gold into circulation.” “In our case, the cost is CPU time and electricity.”
Here it is, really. At its core, Bitcoin is a ledger system, protected by multiple layers of encryption, that tracks the ownership of each digital coin on a shared global platform that can manage financial transactions. This blockchain beast doesn’t come with gimmicks like smart contracts or lightning-fast transaction settlements. It’s about unbreakable security on a global scale, all managed by a community of developers with no central person or controlling company.
21 million Bitcoin limit
The network will stop generating more coins when 21 million bitcoins are available. At the current production rate and planned increases in mining difficulty, the last bitcoin should appear around 2140.
Thus, there is a hard limit to the long-term supply of bitcoin units, comparable to the Earth’s limited supply of available gold. You must take extraordinary measures to exceed the limit set by the gold reserves.
I mean really extraordinary. Find a way to mine asteroids to get more gold, develop some kind of nuclear fusion that creates gold atoms from other materials, or figure out how to extract gold from a planet’s core and bring it to the surface. None of this will happen in our lifetime, and probably never will.
Likewise, bitcoin has an absolute limit until the majority of the mainnet accepts a different code base with different goals. In this case, you need a majority of bitcoin owners and miners to vote against their financial interests. Otherwise, you can copy the bitcoin code and tweak it to your heart’s content, hoping that the new fork will win the crypto community’s favor and dethrone the original bitcoin.
If you build it, competitors will come
This was attempted several times, but the results were modest at best. A code fork has been created Bitcoin Cash (BCH -1.57%) More control in the hands of large mining operations in 2017. Bitcoin Cash was worth $1,615 per coin when it led the crypto-trading platform Coinbase (COIN -7.80%) listed it on December 19, 2017 — near the absolute peak of the 2017 cryptocurrency bull market. Today, the price of the coin has fallen to 111 dollars.
Other hooks included Bitcoin Gold (BTG -3.61%) (designed for mining with graphics cards, not specialized mining processors) and Bitcoin SV (BSV -2.12%), implementing a more radical version of Bitcoin Cash’s policy change. Bitcoin Gold has lost 97% of its initial value, while Bitcoin SV is down 41% in its three-year history. Despite a brutal market correction in 2022, the original Bitcoin gained 165% over SV’s lifetime and 3% against Bitcoin Cash’s 97% collapse:
Bitcoin Price data by YCharts
You could argue that every altcoin on the market – over 20,000 of them – wanted to beat Bitcoin at its own game in some way. So far they have failed. Bitcoin remains the most popular and valuable digital currency on the market.
What’s Next for Bitcoin?
The cryptocurrency market is booming as we speak. In particular, last month’s FTX debacle may have inspired national and global lawmakers to take immediate action to regulate the crypto industry. When this happens (if not), Bitcoin will have a more solid financial footing as the market begins to purge scammers and ridiculous crypto projects. Important leaders such as Rostin Behnam of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and Gary Gensler of the Security and Exchange Commission are leaning toward regulating Bitcoin as a gold-like commodity rather than a stock-like security.
I’m not winning points for originality here, but facts are facts. The original cryptocurrency continues to offer data security, long-term stability (with some temporary speed bumps along the way), and an unmatched store-of-value profile. Other names may rise for a while and then fall out of favor again, but this system is built to last.
Bitcoin is the cryptocurrency to put under your digital pillow for the next hundred years or more.