The birth of crypto

Bitcoin and crypto are still shrouded in mystery to a lot of people. That’s not entirely surprising given that the concept of digital money only became a reality a little over a decade ago. To understand Bitcoin’s roots, we must go back to the autumn of 2008. The financial world was in a state of disarray in the wake of the Lehman Brothers debacle, and the financial superpowers had been obliged to put in place wide ranging policies to prevent a complete collapse of the world’s financial infrastructure. It sounds melodramatic, but at the time, that was a genuine possibility.

This was the financial backdrop when a man nobody had ever heard of by the name of Satoshi Nakamoto published a paper that would change the world of finance forever. His document was entitled: Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System and you can find it online to this day. At the time, the mysterious Satoshi sent it to a select mailing list in the cypherpunk community.

Looking back, the timing could not have been better. But even so, initially, those outside this specific community paid no attention. What did some crazy cypherpunk idea about electronic money have to do with mainstream economics? Two months after the publication of Satoshi’s paper, Bitcoin was officially launched and those who dismissed it as a fad that would be here today and gone tomorrow are still counting the cost of their misjudgement.

Boom and bust

Bitcoin is associated in most people’s minds with volatility. When an investment is volatile, it means it can go up or down in value suddenly and dramatically. Over those first golden years, it went up faster than anyone would have thought possible and created a number of billionaires out of those brave first movers. These include people like the Winklevoss twins, who seemed to have stepped straight out of a Wall Street movie, along with early investors like Changpeng Zhao.

Of course, what goes up also comes down, and it is this side of Bitcoin’s volatility that has hung in the atmosphere, like the smoke following an explosion. On the first day of 2017, one Bitcoin was worth $964. By mid-December, its price had risen to more than $18,000 and those who sold at that point had a very merry Christmas indeed.

Sadly, few people had heard of Bitcoin Revolution at the time, as the platform had only recently launched, so there were many who either bought more or held on to their digital coins, only to see the price collapse to $6,000 by the beginning of February 2018. It was Bitcoin’s huge boom and bust. Nothing quite like it had been seen before, and while crypto still exhibits volatility, it is certainly not on that sort of scale.

Finding stability

Today, many of those who only have a peripheral knowledge Bitcoin still associate it with that crazy period in 2017-18. But in the finance and investment community, crypto assets in general and Bitcoin in particular are acknowledged to be a wise component of any investment portfolio. We are not investment consultants, so we will not say any more on that. But what we can discuss is the fact that the same characteristics that make crypto attractive to the investment experts also draw the Forex-style traders and make this the perfect time to trade crypto using the Bitcoin Revolution software.

The price drop that began in 2018 continued right into 2019. Bitcoin finally bottomed out at around $3,500 in June. Since then, it has displayed a steady upward trajectory. It has not been without its volatility, but this has not been extreme, and the overall trend has been positive. These factors make it an attractive proposition to both long-term investors, who focus on the overall trend, and traders using Bitcoin Revolution, who exploit those short term peaks and troughs along the way.

12 months after hitting rock bottom, Bitcoin was back up above $9,000. What made this news doubly positive was that the digital asset’s steady growth continued regardless of the chaos into which the world’s commercial and financial markets had been thrown in the first half of 2020 with the Covid-19 lockdown.

Looking to the future

The digital asset that set the whole crypto market in motion and that was the inspiration for literally thousands of new cryptocurrencies to be born has come a long way in those 12 short years since the enigmatic Satoshi Nakamoto published his paper.

While acceptance of crypto as a trading instrument is now a fact, more widespread adoption of digital money beyond this specific application is still some way off. One of the biggest roadblocks has almost certainly surrounded security. Despite the tech gurus talking about how blockchain represents the pinnacle of online security, we also see headlines about Bitcoin frauds and thefts worth millions, even billions, of dollars.

To some minds, then, while holding Bitcoins in a trading account is one thing, they will not have the confidence to use them as they would dollars, pounds or euros until there is a crypto ecosystem that they are confident is secure as well as convenient. The Chief Technology Officer of one digital wallets developer told a popular UK newspaper that achieving this will transform the way people view bitcoin transactions and that by the late 2020s, nobody will think twice about using crypto to pay for their groceries or to fuel up the car.

It is worth noting that he said “crypto” and not “bitcoin.” Being the pioneer brings rewards, as we have seen, but it can also be fraught with risk. Bitcoin is still by far the most important and valuable cryptocurrency right now, but will that still be the case in seven or eight years?

Look at other areas of tech and you can see indications that this might not be the case. Alta Vista and Webcrawlers were pioneers in the world of search engines. Likewise, MySpace and Friends Reunited invented the idea of social media. They blossomed briefly, but when searching the web or using social started to hit the mainstream, it was Google, MSN, Facebook and Twitter that took the ball and ran with it. So will Bitcoin ultimately go down the same road as these other tech pioneers? And if so, what will replace it?

Those at the forefront of financial and technological thought believe that while crypto represents the future, Bitcoin’s time at the top will be limited. Experts predict that the crypto market will grow exponentially by 5,000 percent or more by 2028, but as it does so, Bitcoin’s dominant position will diminish dramatically.

This is partially due to the blockchain technology that lies at the heart of crypto. There will only ever be a finite number of Bitcoins, so the currency will not be able to scale at the rate that is being predicted for the overall crypto market. This is where those Altcoins will potentially come into their own. Could one of them emerge as the Facebook to Bitcoin’s MySpace?

Ethereum’s founders, Vitalik Buterin and his team, have worked to find ways around the scalability problem, but it could well be that the biggest cryptocurrency in future will be one that is in its infancy right now, such as XRP, or perhaps even one that has yet to arrive on the scene. Developments in this area represent just one of the indicators that influence the trading signals that the Bitcoin Revolution software constantly monitors to understand market trends and to accurately predict how prices are likely to behave.