Bitcoin Background

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AS AN INVESTOR, WHY DO I CARE ABOUT BITCOIN?
For the first time since the advent of the credit card in the 1960s, we have
a technology that radically modernizes money. Bitcoin the digital currency
and its clearing network are open source, mobile, peer-to-peer, cryptographically protected, privacy-oriented, and native to the Internet. The fusion of
these technologies allows for a level of security and efficiency unprecedented in the world of money, banking, and finance—thus strengthening
Bitcoin’s potential as a disruptive technology, which could first disturb and
then displace its predecessors.
To illustrate, these are some of the areas in which Bitcoin technology can
directly compete with the existing infrastructure:
• $2 trillion annual market for electronic payments
• $1 trillion annual e-commerce market
• $514 billion annual remittance market
• $2.3 trillion hedge fund market
• $7 trillion gold market
• $4.5 trillion cash market
• $16.7 trillion offshore deposit market
Bitcoin investors are in the company of top venture capital brass such as
Marc Andreessen, Reid Hoffman, Fred Wilson, and PayPal co-founder Peter
Thiel; by billionaires such as Jeffrey Skoll (eBay co-founder) and Li Ka-shing
(the richest person in Asia); of iconic executives such as Vikram Pandit
(Citigroup), Blythe Masters (JPMorgan Chase), and Tom Glocer (Reuters);
and most recently, by large cap companies such as Google, Qualcomm, New
York Stock Exchange, NASDAQ, USAA (American bank and insurer), and NTT
DOCOMO ($75B Japanese phone operator).
Indeed, its potential as ‘money in the cloud’ and ‘gold 2.0’ has made Bitcoin
the sector with the fastest growing volume in startup investments worldwide. VC investments are on a run rate for over $900 million in 2015 (double
that of 2014), and the Bitcoin market cap has exploded from $1.4 million in
2011 to $4 billion early this year.
There are four prominent risks associated with Bitcoin: a better digital currency emerging and stealing the market lead, an undetected bug in the system, a hard fork (when some nodes in the network upgrade to software that
is incompatible with previous versions) causing the Bitcoin payment network to split in two, and a sustained attack by an organization with substantial financial resources (such as a government).
Though a better currency is possible, disruptive protocols—such as TCP/IP
for the Internet—have proven to be resilient once adopted by a critical mass
of the population, as Bitcoin has when compared with altcoins (we cover
this in more detail later in this report). With any software application, undiscovered bugs may destabilize the system, but Bitcoin’s open-source nature
allows for anyone to contribute security patches and structural improvement to the code. A hard fork creates competition between two versions of
Bitcoin, and after a period of fear and doubt, eventually the value will flow
to the version deemed most useful by its users. Lastly, an organized attack is
possible but extremely expensive, and there are many defense mechanisms
in place that make the attack more difficult to execute.
In closing, given how enormous the potential future value of the Bitcoin
network is if successful, we maintain that the risk-reward ratio for Bitcoin
the currency is currently the most favorable of any investment in the world.
After thorough research and planning (of which this report will hopefully be
of assistance), Bitcoin can be a valuable addition to your portfolio.