CoinMarketCap.com  SAT 4/26/225  

TURBO 175%      DEEP 103%      PENGO 86%

VIRTUAL 89%      BRETT 88%      TRUMP 85 %

https://experts.bitwiseinvestments.com/cio-memos/the-great-derisking-of-bitcoin 

(31)    Now is the best time in history to purchase bitcoin (on a risk-adjusted basis).

The first time I heard about bitcoin was in February 2011.

I was working at ETF.com at the time, managing a team of young financial analysts running the world’s first ETF data and analytics service. We had a weekly meeting where we talked about what was happening in the market. In February 2011, bitcoin first crossed $1, and one of my analysts called out this historic “dollar threshold.” He then led an amazing conversation about what bitcoin was, how it worked, and what it could become.

If I had invested $1,000 in bitcoin after that meeting, it would be worth $88 million today. Instead, I left the office and got a coffee.

I share this story because everyone—everyone—feels this way. We all wish we’d bought bitcoin sooner.

But the thing we forget in these stories is that there were huge risks to bitcoin at the time.

On the day I had my $1 meeting, for instance, the largest crypto exchange in the world was New Liberty Financial. Here’s a look at their Terms of Service.¹

In hindsight, it’s easy to say I should have bought $1,000 of bitcoin. But at the time, that meant sending $1,000 to a random PayPal address. Throw in custody, regulatory, technological, and governmental risks … and putting $1,000 on bitcoin in 2011 was a massive gamble.

I’m sharing this story now for two reasons: 1) to let you off the hook for missing bitcoin the first time; and 2) to convince you that now it’s different.

https://www.facebook.com/raymel2412B

https://www.facebook.com/raymel2412B/posts/pfbid02Hzqwuu5A4Dq4TToJX9U9Q6JTBPT5pepc5G739BRvWWcffM4dLUM8WijoQFr6p6xcl 

(In fact, I believe that today—right now—marks the single best moment in history to buy bitcoin on a risk-adjusted basis.)  

We Just Removed the Last Existential Risk)

Every investment involves weighing risk versus reward. A lotto ticket can turn $1 into $1 billion, but your expected return is zero.

In its earliest days, bitcoin was a little like a lottery ticket: huge upside, but equally huge risks.

When bitcoin first launched, for instance, there was no guarantee it would even work. Yes, the white paper was brilliant. Yes, logic suggested it would work. But there had been multiple efforts to build electronic cash prior to the launch of bitcoin, and all of them had failed. (As one example, check out this paper, “How To Make A Mint: The Cryptography of Anonymous Electronic Cash,” written by the National Security Agency in 1997.)

But there were other big risks for bitcoin in the early days besides the technology itself. For years, trading was a risk—early exchanges were either dodgy or plagued by low volume and poor operations. Then Coinbase was created in late 2011, and the game changed.

For a while, custody was a risk, too—until established blue-chips like Fidelity began offering self-custody and institutional custody.

In bitcoin’s earliest days, there were also legitimate concerns about money laundering, criminal activity, regulatory standards, mining concentration, and more.

The incredible thing about bitcoin is it has slowly but surely knocked down each and every one of these existential risks over time.

The launch of spot bitcoin ETFs in January 2024 got us over another major hurdle by providing regulatory clarity for U.S. institutional investors looking to access the space.

But even after the ETFs launched, one existential risk always lingered in my head: What if the government banned it?