Can it still go up from here? (with an update on Kraken.com)

The question I’ve been hearing from new people to whom I mention Bitcoin is “Can it still go up from here?” The answer is yes, definitely YES!!

Let’s start with some facts

Kraken as of Dec 15): Each of the past few days has produced 50,000 new account registrations and 10,000 new support tickets! Ten times more than last quarter! Number of simultaneous users, daily trades and volume are also making new all-time highs. They are struggling to keep up.

Coinbase added 300,000 new users over the Thanksgiving holiday week. The new additions brought Coinbase’s account total to 13.3 million exceeding the 10.6 million brokerage accounts at Charles Schwab! Over the course of the year they have added more than 5 times the number on their support staff and have seen the number of transactions increase during peak hours by over 40 times!!

Fidelity Investments is the fifth-largest asset management firm in the US with $2.3 TRILLION under management. It has just made an agreement with Coinbase to allow their 26 million individual investors access to Bitcoin. Not only that, but Fidelity allows its 40,000 employees to buy coffee or lunch in the company’s cafeteria with bitcoin and Fidelity has ongoing profitable Bitcoin and Ethereum mining! In fact, the CEO was quoted as saying that operation “is actually making a lot of money.”

To recap, HUGE numbers of new buyers are coming into the market at such a rate that the exchanges are having a hard time keeping up. Add to that the fact that very, very few people actually know how to buy bitcoin and you may agree with me that this market has a long way to run…a long, long way to run.

What most people don’t understand is …

that bitcoin isn’t just a currency or a better way to protect wealth from the constantly eroding US dollar due to programmed inflation. (Although that would be enough just by itself to boom bitcoin sales.) The technology behind bitcoin allows individuals to operate without a middle man, not just in currency, but in real estate records, citizenship records, sports betting, video game rewards, investing, loans against inventory and every other area which is now controlled by a central authority. This change will take at least a decade to wash through our society, but make no mistake, this is no ripple. It’s a tsunami. The coming changes will be no less sweeping than from the old rotary phone that was wired into the wall to our modern smartphones with downloadable apps! This is the future. It may be misunderstood. It may be delayed. It may be fought, but it will not stop until society as we know it is transformed.

On the investment side, besides bitcoin, there are 1400 alternative coins (altcoins). Most of those will die within a year. (According to the US Small Business Administration, 90% of all new businesses fail within the first year. So, why should it be any different for cryptocurrencies?) However, if one percent of them succeed, that’s 14 that will be worth 20x, 50x or 200x what they currently cost. So, part of investing in cryptocurrency should include buying at least 4 altcoins in addition to Bitcoin.

A Positive Note on Kraken.com

Yesterday, Kraken posted the following on their official Facebook page:

“The recent, unexpected explosion in demand has been overwhelming. Each of the past few days has produced 50,000 new account registrations and 10,000 new support tickets — an order of magnitude above where we were just last quarter. Concurrent users, daily trades and volumes are also hitting new all-time highs. We are struggling to keep up.

“Kraken.com performance is extremely degraded and unreliable. Clients can expect severely slow response and difficulty with all web services. Requests will frequently timeout and fail. At the moment, the only solution is to wait and try again later.

“Next week we will be rolling out a major systems upgrade which should resolve these scaling and load issues. The upgrade is long overdue and has been substantially delayed by the diversion of resources to the enormous effort required to deal with the huge expansion we are undergoing.

“Our domestic US dollar partners are also experiencing strain. Most were not prepared for the massive spike in transfer processing and current delays are outside of the usual range.”

FYI: I just did a couple of transactions on Kraken and it was like the old days. Quick with no problems.

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