Bitcoin is now a teenager.
The world’s first (and largest) crypto turned 13 on January 3.
On that day in 2009, Satoshi Nakamoto started one of the biggest movements in the history of the world.
An experiment that started just 13 years ago now commands a market cap of $830 billion. And merchants widely accept it as a means of payment.
In the last year, El Salvador made bitcoin legal tender. Other countries like Brazil and Ukraine may soon follow suit.
It’s even gaining traction right here in the U.S. A recent poll shows 27% of Americans support making bitcoin legal tender.
The mayor of Miami has already taken paychecks in bitcoin and wants to pay workers in bitcoin.
Bloomberg reports that billionaires think it’s worthwhile to have some of one’s personal wealth in cryptos in case fiat currency goes to “hell.”
Bridgewater’s Ray Dalio says: “Cash is trash.” He recently revealed he’s holding cryptos months after questioning crypto’s utility as a store of wealth.
And, according to Goldman Sachs, nearly half of the family offices it does business with are interested in cryptos.
But bitcoin might not be the best place to invest in the crypto market over the next decade.
The new era of cryptos features assets backed by the world’s most useful digital resources.
The rally in these assets started last year. And it will continue throughout this decade.
I’m Still a Bitcoin Believer
Don’t get me wrong — I’m a bitcoin believer.
It offers the three most important functions of money:
- Medium of exchange: Merchants need to widely accept it and be able to use it to assign prices to various kinds of goods and services.
- Store of value: People can earn or collect it and then store it for future use.
- Unit of account: It needs to provide a common measure of the value of all the goods and services.
Also, bitcoin’s supply isn’t controlled by a government like modern-day fiat.
But bitcoin’s value is based on what people believe it to be, much like gold.
The world could wake up tomorrow morning and decide bitcoin is only worth a fraction of its current price.
As we’ve seen in the past, it isn’t always the first iterations of new tech that become the biggest winners.
Just look at AOL, Yahoo and IBM.
That’s why Ethereum and the newest wave of cryptos will surpass bitcoin’s value at some point.
The New Currencies of the Information Age
Layer-1 protocols are backed by the digital resource that they provide.
That could be computational power, network bandwidth or data storage.
When Ethereum arrived in 2015, it took the same principles of bitcoin and added a scripting language on top of it.
Ethereum’s value is that it controls a digital resource, namely the computational power of the Ethereum network.
You need its native token, Ether, to power a transaction.
That includes buying an NFT of a cartoon monkey, making a wager on a football game or lending crypto assets for yield.
Ethereum and other Layer 1s burst on the scene in 2021.
Here’s a chart of how the top five have fared:
I know I’m going out on a limb here. But as our world becomes increasingly digital, I believe Layer 1s will be the new currencies of the information age.
They’ll replace national currencies like the dollar and the euro as the world’s global reserves.
I feel so strongly about it that I recommended Terra (LUNA) to my Next Wave Crypto Fortunes readers last year.
And over the last 13 months, they had the chance to lock in profits of 18,325% on a partial position!
That’s because these crypto assets will power the next iteration of the internet, Web3.
We’ll still celebrate bitcoin’s birthday every year. But it won’t be the world’s biggest crypto forever.
Regards,
Editor, Strategic Fortunes
Morning Movers
From open till noon Eastern time.
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