The rapid rise of Bitcoin’s value throughout the past year has brought great attention to the cryptocurrency exchange while also raising many questions.
A $100 Bitcoin investment in 2010 is worth over $50,000,000 today. Valued at $0.08 when Bitcoin was started, today, the cost is approximately $11,100 but still continues to fluctuate.
One might be highly tempted to invest in such a highly profitable currency when reading these statistics; however, the cryptocurrency has proved to be difficult to predict and manage with sudden rises and drops in its prices. The ability to understand trading strategy can help you quickly earn money from this trend in investment is a major reason why Bitcoin has recently become one of the most popular trends.
Some students at Loyola have decided to look into Bitcoin as a way to make profit.
Junior Paul Hage said, “I made $150 from Bitcoin without even doing anything, so I feel as though if one invests at the right time, he or she will not regret the decision. Although I think it is unfair to call Bitcoin ‘a joke,’ I do agree that the investment is full of risk, considering past crashes.”
Hage first heard of Bitcoin from a few friends who had invested. After researching Bitcoin and noticing its consistent upward trend, he made the decision to invest a few hundred dollars.
Hage said, “I only invested $300 because, as a first-time investor, I realized that I should only invest what I am comfortable losing. I also knew about previous Bitcoin “mini-crashes”, so I didn’t really want to risk losing a large sum of money.” Use platforms like metatrader 4 to trade
Hage now looks forward to the mainstreaming of Bitcoin. He said, “I can also understand that Bitcoin is given a bad reputation because it cannot be used to purchase anything currently; however, I believe that if the cryptocurrency becomes usable, many people will regret not buying any Bitcoin.”
Junior Tristan Silerio, another cryptocurrency investor, said, “My intentions when I first bought was simply to make money fast. Cryptocurrency is one of those ideas of ‘getting rich quick,’ and I believed in that. By putting in small investments at a time, letting it rise, I would almost always make a profit.”
Silerio has always been interested in multiple business endeavors. He said, “I thought that it was a great pastime and that this was the future, but buying and researching into investments and markets also allowed for me to have more interest in business. It allowed me to see what careers I should look into.”
With such an exponential rise in value in the last year, many economists and investors have said it will be a challenge for Bitcoin to prove that this rise isn’t going to result in a crash. The CEO of J.P. Morgan Chase Jamie Dimon has described Bitcoin as “a fraud,” and “it’s worse than tulip bulbs.”
Sophomore Duke Fluent, who has been investing in Bitcoin for two years, said, “At first, it really was a joke, and it wasn’t supposed to be really anything until for some reason cryptocurrency came into the norm. I could see how the president of a bank that deals with actual currency might think that it is a joke because he is trying to defend his own position, but it has gotten to that point where you can’t really call it a joke anymore. It is on the same level as the U.S. dollar, the British pound and even the euro.”
Fluent bought a single Bitcoin, which was under $500 at the time, without an intention of making a profit.
For Fluent it was just a fun way of getting into the new trend of investing in cryptocurrencies. However, with the value of Bitcoin rising, he is looking forward to watching his profit increase.
Fluent said, “I am actually extremely happy with the profit because I bought it when it was dirt cheap, and now, it is soaring. Multiple people have told me to cash out right now, but I am hoping to see where it would get by the time I go to college, so I could use that towards my education.”
However, Loyola students acknowledge that with the high reward that can be obtained when investing into cryptocurrencies, there is also a high risk factor. For trading advice check Trade Wise.
Silerio said, “The market of blockchain technology has its risks and dangers. Since the government does not monitor any of the exchanges and trades, the actual selling and trading of the market is a little suspicious. But if someone can see past that, I think that the cryptocurrency market is revolutionary.”
