Catherine Wood, the CEO and CIO of Ark Investment Management, and reporters from the Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg, in an interview about the future of bitcoin and blockchain, said that though the market capitalization of bitcoin may be currently lower than the one that tech giants like Apple and Amazon have, the idea behind bitcoin may be bigger than both of them.
“The network value of Bitcoin when you include Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash is little over $100 bln. So it’s come up and it’s come very fast. But it’s at a fraction of Apple’s valuation, of Amazon’s valuation, and we think its a much bigger idea than either of those.”
Comparing the total market cap of bitcoin to the overall economy, the digital currency is but a small fraction in the trillions of dollars of “network value”, according to Paul Vigna, a reporter for the Wall Street Journal and Mrs. Wood. Mr. Vigna said in the interview that bitcoin, or the paper announcing the idea, was released at the height of the Global Financial Crisis in 2008 by the famous and yet unknown Satoshi Nakomoto, the creator of Bitcoin. The software was released in January, 2009. What did release did was offer an “alternative” to the banking system that has literally tanked the hopes of people around the world, with Lehman Brothers going down and the real estate bubble bursting leaving millions of people unemployed and on the streets.
The advantage that bitcoin gives and the reason why the banks and governments are now more or less afraid of the digital currency, is the fact that it eliminates the third party involved in any transaction that can be digitized. Paul Vigna compared bitcoin to the exchange of two emails, only two people involved and the value is preserved between them.
With the rising popularity of blockchain and bitcoin, along with all digital currencies, whose total market cap, including bitcoin, is now around $180 billion, are turning people to believe more in technology for money preservation and safety than in banks. This is a huge benefit for digital currencies because once you change the perception that a bank is better at managing your money than a technology-based coin, you automatically increase the value and trust in bitcoin. It becomes an alternative to the standard banking system, creating transparency, speed and cost efficiency.