opinion
Oitcoin - Risk and Chance within Uncertain Times Some people praise it, others shake their heads when they hear its name: Bitcoin is dividing the opinions of financial experts already for years. Recently the cryptocurrency came to the center of attention again due to a fulminant rise within a year of lockdowns and uncertain prospects.
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hat if you hear a story about becoming a multimillionaire in just 10 years without doing anything except making an investment of, let’s say, 10 Dollars? Sounds like a beautiful dream or one of those annoying scam mails, doesn’t it? Well, admittedly something like this is more than unlikely to happen, but still it’s not impossible either. In fact, it would have been possible if you were one of the early believers in something that you will currently find in almost every debate about finances and money – the cryptocurrency Bitcoin. You probably came across Bitcoin somehow, at least since the end of the year 2020 you should have heard about it. Almost daily the news could present a new all-time high of the Bitcoin price until it reached $41,973 on the 8th of January 2021, before it slightly fell again. But first things first: what is Bitcoin? No worries, we won’t go into the deep technical details. Bitcoin is a currency, like US Dollar, Euro or Macedonian Denar, but in contrast to those it doesn’t belong to a state or union, neither is it “managed” by a central bank or similar institution. It is a decentralized and digital currency, so physical forms of notes and coins are not common. Furthermore, while online transactions with traditional currencies need an intermediating organization like a bank, Bitcoin works peer-to-peer without a third party involved. For those reasons 18 - VOICES
as well as other encoded privacy features, Bitcoin is considered as a comparatively anonymous payment means, what in turn was one of the main reasons why many people used it during its early days. It is no secret that Bitcoin was the means of choice for dealing with illegal goods and services on darknet marketplaces, but the times when the cryptocurrency was mainly serving such purposes belong to the past. Since its creation, Bitcoin went through many ups and downs, but the trend is clearly pointing up. But why has the price of Bitcoin risen that much especially last year? One reasonable explanation can be this uncertain time that we live in for more than a year already. With COVID-19 the world became more and more unpredictable. We feel like things can change daily. To prevent a probably even worse collapse of their economies, many governments and central banks flooded the market with money. For that reason, some people expect an increasing inflation and fear that the money they have in their bank accounts (or under their pillows) right now could be worth much less in the near future. So they are searching for ways to store their value. While Bitcoin for sure is still a quite volatile and risky investment it
has o n e b i g advantage compared to traditional currencies, namely, its amount is limited to a maximum of 21 million coins. For this reason, Bitcoin might be more comparable to gold than to other currencies, with some people even seeing it as “the digital gold”. But
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