Comment
Author: Admin | 2025-04-27
Collapsed exchange Mt. Gox, one of the largest crypto-linked financial failures.More recently, the huge gain in the price has left early investors like Janssens dealing with the problem of having too much bitcoin as a proportion of their overall portfolio. Some bitcoin investors who vow never to sell their cryptocurrencies are known as “hodlers” (holding on for dear life). “I sometimes rebalance my portfolio when it becomes 50 per cent of my assets. I’m smart enough to sell sometimes — I’m not a hardcore hodler,” says Janssens. Seven years after the Belgian’s historic trip, paying for private charters by bitcoin is not quite mainstream but no longer newsworthy. More than one in 10 flights were settled with bitcoin in January at jet-hire company PrivateFly, where the share of cryptocurrency revenues grew to a fifth of the total. Denison, a US luxury yacht charter company, published a list of its 372-strong fleet in February with prices in bitcoin.However, Janssens is slightly disappointed in bitcoin’s evolution from a peer-to-peer means of payment to a perceived store of value, which he says is “completely against the original aim” of the cryptocurrency. “It’s interesting to see big companies buy bitcoin as a digital gold, but I have personally shifted my focus to currencies like ethereum,” he says.There are hundreds if not thousands of alternative coins with varying characteristics. Like bitcoin, all are created by computers solving complex mathematical equations, churning out digital code. Some, known as “shitcoins”, are created purely as get-rich-quick schemes. Janssens is among wealthy investors who think ethereum, launched in 2015 and now the second-most traded cryptocurrency, could be bigger than its erstwhile peer. Supporters say it could rewire the financial infrastructure. Billionaire financiers Mike Novogratz, Peter Thiel and Alan Howard are among investors who recently announced their backing of a venture that relies on ethereum. While bitcoin is just a piece of digital code, ethereum acts as a store of data and a marketplace for assets as well. It can perform the tasks of brokers, exchanges and other intermediaries, with the help of so-called embedded smart contracts. These ensure transaction details are correct, funds are paid and assets change hands as set out in a preprogrammed piece of code.Ethereum is also behind most non-fungible tokens, which are digital representations of things, people or concepts that investors can buy in the form of units of data stored on a secure computer
Add Comment