Have you checked the Bitcoin price recently? The cryptocurrency's price has risen about 40% this year, inching closer to its pandemic-era record of nearly $69,000 per coin.
Some of Bitcoin's most passionate investors embrace the HODL mantra. This basically stands for “Hold on to death.” My philosophy is never to sell Bitcoin, even when the price is crashing like it has been for the past few years.
Well, those HODLers now rejoice.
Sean Longstreet started investing in Bitcoin in 2017, when the price of Bitcoin was around $17,000 per coin. The musician and artist has continued to buy through multiple cryptocurrencies that saw Bitcoin crash to embarrassing lows.
“When things go wrong, you have to lie to your beliefs. There's a saying: 'When there's blood on the streets, you buy money.' So I didn't sell, I just cried.” It held up,” he said.
Longstreet won't say how much Bitcoin he owns — a taboo question for Bitcoin enthusiasts — but he says he owns more cryptocurrencies than stocks.
And while he may be tempted to say “I told you so” to skeptical friends and family, he's learned to resist that urge.
“If you try to bring your family or anything on board, you’re going to put too much strain on it and something bad will happen,” he said.
Bitcoin's recent surge is largely due to the SEC's approval of Bitcoin Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs, abbreviated as ETFs). ETFs allow investors large and small to put money into Bitcoin without touching a cryptocurrency wallet or actually understanding blockchain.
Ryan Rasmussen is a researcher at Bitwise Asset Management. Over $1 billion has been poured into their Bitcoin ETF.
“Now anyone can open a brokerage account and allocate it to Bitcoin with the click of a button. This was like the Bitcoin IPO moment,” he said.
Pensions, hedge funds, and retail traders are saying, “Of course we're going to dip our toe into a Bitcoin IPO,” especially while prices are rising.
But Lee Reiners of the Duke Center for Financial Economics said it would be risky for more mainstream financial players to get into cryptocurrencies when the next Bitcoin winter inevitably arrives.
“We have now created an interstate highway connecting the traditional financial system and the crypto economy, and problems in one can easily spill over into the other,” he said.
Bitcoiner Sean Longstreet agrees that there will be another downturn at some point, but he has no plans to sell anytime soon.
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