CAN BITCOIN WEAR GOLD'S CROWN?

Some players foresee Bitcoin surpassing gold in total market cap sooner than later

- Abhishek Mukherjee [e-mail]

One unwritten law of finance is that any stock we buy loses momentum almost immediately, whereas any stock we sell, invariably surges afterwards. And as anyone who has spent even a little time in the market can attest, the second hurts way more than the first.

But anytime you are feeling miserable about your selling decisions or missed chances, remember this name—Laszlo Hanyecz.

On 22 May 2010, this Florida-based programmer received two large pizzas from a Papa John’s outlet. And etched his name into history books.

Why? Because Hanyecz used 10,000 Bitcoins for the meal, making it the first documented real-world transaction using cryptocurrency.

But more mind-bending are its financial dimensions. The 10,000 Bitcoins, which were worth around $40 back then, are now valued at a whopping $1.2 billion. If only Hanyecz had skipped dinner that night!

No other asset has traversed the full arc from ridiculed to resisted to revered as swiftly as Bitcoin. And none polarizes opinion so sharply. Once dismissed as a fringe novelty designed to appeal to basement-dwelling coders and secrecy-minded criminals, Bitcoin is now among the most keenly tracked assets in global finance today.

While geopolitical upheavals, fanciful valuations, and corporate earning headwinds have cast a long shadow over financial markets over the past year, and fuelled a generational bull run in safe haven assets like gold and silver, Bitcoin has outshone them all.

In fact, many of the forces driving the yellow metal higher have also powered the rally in Bitcoin, a scarcely believable pairing of the world’s oldest store of value and its youngest challenger. Not bad for an underground decentralized token which was born in 2009 as a result of a white paper on blockchain technology authored by a yet-to-be-identified developer.