GREAT NEWS – Teeka Tiwari and his team have made a last-minute decision to open up Palm Beach Confidential this month with a LIVE Crypto Webinar on March 14th.
Do Digital Currencies Have Value?
Many people believe digital currencies have no real value.
One reader recently wrote to ask: “Teeka, what determines the value of a cryptocurrency? How can I ensure this isn’t just a fad that’s going to zero?” I asked Vitalik Buterin, the founder of the digital currency system Ethereum and its cryptocurrency, ether, how he’d respond to that criticism.
I’ll tell you what he said in just a moment.
But first, we’re getting closer and closer to my $1 million dollar Bitcoin giveaway on November 2nd at 8 p.m. (Eastern and Pacific).
I hope to see you there.Getting back to Vitalik..
In case you haven’t heard of him, some consider Vitalik Buterin the Steve Jobs of the crypto world.
Vitalik told me he wasn’t always a fan of digital currencies. In fact, in the beginning, he was downright skeptical. In his own words, he told me that when he first learned about Bitcoin, the world’s most popular cryptocurrency, he thought, “It has no intrinsic value.” I asked him what changed him from a nonbeliever of digital currencies to a believer… who went on to develop one of his own.
He said he wrote a few articles about Bitcoin and was paid five bitcoins per article. “I managed to earn my way up to 20 bitcoins, and then spent 8 1/2 of them and got a T-shirt out of it, so it’s like, ‘Look, 8 1/2 bitcoins obviously have real value. I got a T-shirt out of them.”
What he said next is of extreme importance…
You can yell at the market and call it stupid all you want… but at the end of the day, Bitcoin was trading back then for $3. Now, it’s trading at [over $5,600]… and people clearly are willing to pay for them. Vitalik is right…
Here’s the truth about money: It can be anything. Take the U.S. dollar, for example. There’s nothing backing it up – we went off the gold standard in 1971.
So the dollar really is… just a promise… an “act of faith.” A digital currency is no different. It’s simply internet-based money.
And like any other medium of exchange, many people around the world have decided it is money. In other words, Vitalik was saying was that the marketplace has already accepted digital currencies.
After all, people have bought Tesla cars, rented luxury villas, and bought diamond rings with Bitcoin already. They believe they’ll be able to use digital currencies in the future to buy stuff. That alone makes it have value. Or take gold itself as an example… Gold demand is driven by people’s belief in it as a storehouse of value. That’s why people in India and China buy so much of it.
From a practical industrial standpoint, the current price of gold (at over $1,250) makes no logical sense. It’s gold’s status that drives its price way above its industrial value. It’s the same way with digital currencies. To me, it feels like 1992 and the rise of the internet. Back then, the internet was showing up on the radar of venture capitalists and forward-thinking investors. There weren’t any real consumer applications yet. But those of us who were informed on the space knew the technology would be transformational.
Then, like now, we started seeing an enormous amount of money pour into a brand-new sector. And that’s why I think, within the next three years, we will see an explosion of brand-new consumer and institutional applications for cryptocurrencies and their underlying technology— the blockchain. Just like what we saw happen in the internet space when “go live” applications like Amazon and eBay started hitting the marketplace in 1995.
I want you to have a chance to get in on this pioneering technology.
Cryptocurrencies have proven themselves in a broader market.
And their acceptance will only continue to grow. There’s are around 15 million–35 million Bitcoin users. We’ll split it in the middle and call it 25 million. To put that number in perspective, more than 167 million people own stocks, bonds, and real estate. With a potential market of tens of millions more people, I think it’s a smart bet that Bitcoin is going to go much, much higher in price…