The spike (and volatility) in the Bitcoin price has attracted renewed interest from many individuals, investors and businesses in recent weeks.
Today, I’ll take a bit of a deeper dive into the numbers and look at the reason why more people are considering Bitcoin as an alternative asset class.
Bitcoin’s main use cases (for now)
Bitcoin is new and evolving technology. For the first time in human history is it possible to create, send and operate a currency without the need of a central government, company or individual.
We are very much at the early stages of development, with some of the most exciting use cases yet to come, but there are already two that are crystal clear:
- Bitcoin as a transfer or payment mechanism
- Bitcoin as a store of wealth, an alternative asset class
This article will focus on the second.
What is an asset class?
Other than spending (consumption), investors (broadly defined as “those with money after consumption”) will typically put their money into an asset or group of assets, with the goal to preserve or grow their money.
Again, broadly speaking, an investor usually chooses one of the following asset classes:
- Stocks, ETFs or mutual funds, where you own a small part of a company
- Bonds, where you lend money to a country’s government and they promise to repay you, with interest, over time
- Cash, which you may keep in a bank, under your mattress or in a foreign currency
- Real estate, in the form of land and residential or business property
- Commodities, such as precious metals or oil, either in physical or derived contract form
An asset class is simply a group of related assets, which can be grouped into as much or as little detail as you want.
The relationship between asset classes
Most savvy investors, won’t put all of their proverbial eggs in the same asset class. This is due to the relationship –correlation and inverse correlation– between most asset classes.
Correlation
Let me sketch an example:
Let’s say there’s a housing crisis in a country, where properties were terribly over-priced, due to dodgy bank lending to customers who couldn’t actually pay back their loans. Suddenly (or eventually) the housing market takes a dip.
Since a lot of banks were backing the home loans, which won’t get repaid, their credibility gets called into question and their stock value begin to get pulled down too.
This, in turn, makes investors in other related financial services nervous, and they start selling those stocks.
This could again trigger other things, like the stock market as a whole or the exchange rate of a currency to get dragged down.
In this case, we had various asset classes influence each other, due to some external event. This is because they are correlated (some are highly correlated, others are loosely correlated).
Inverse correlation
In another example, you may have a factor trigger the uptick in an industry: a government declares that 80% of cars run on electric and hybrid energy in five years. This will boost the price of stocks in electric cars, which may (due to asset class correlation) pull up the value of other industries, such as renewable energy.
Inversely, what may happen is that the stock price of dirty, gas guzzling car manufacturers and even fossil fuel companies, may go down because of it.
A savvy investor will not just have her investments in a diverse basket of equities, but in a diverse basket of asset classes. This means that during a downturn in a certain asset class, those with an inverse-correlation will offer some protection.
What does this have to do with Bitcoin?
Bitcoin has been found to neither be correlated nor inversely-correlated with most other asset classes. It is, rather, uncorrelated.

This is truly catnip for investors: an asset class that operates mostly independent of the movements of all other asset classes.
Absolute performance
Bitcoin shares some of its characteristics with other assets: like stocks, it is traded on multiple markets in multiple currencies around the world; like gold, it is limited in supply and generally seen as a safe haven against currency depreciation; like cash, you can use it to make payments and transfer wealth; like real estate, it is seen and taxed by some authorities as property.
Although I don’t think that Bitcoin should be compared with other currencies and should be seen as something completely new, it is interesting to compare Bitcoin’s performance last year against other world majors:

It has actually held that position of “best performing currency” for three out of the past four complete years (save 2014 when it was, admittedly, the worst performing currency).
When compared to other industries, such as the S&P500 (9.77%), the JSE All Share Index (-0.37%), Bitcoin stands head and shoulders above the rest (+126%, when measured in USD).
In closing
I’m not saying that you should liquidate your their investments to buy Bitcoin. Don’t put all of your eggs in one basket, remember?
Also, it is a new technology with a fair amount of volatility (which is going down over time) and not suited to everyone’s appetite. That said: there’s a clear trend of hedge funds, banks and institutional investors researching and investing in Bitcoin, as a new asset class with a completely new set of rules.
Don’t invest in anything you don’t understand. Instead, start educating yourself about it and then start considering making it part of your portfolio.
But start you must, before you miss what is probably the most important financial innovation of our time.
Query:
1. is bitcoin finite in number, therefor , the more people join/buy the better off you are…? pyramid scheme?
2. resources/commodities (hard) were an astounding success in 2016, kindly give correlation to any resources basket, cause bitcoin might not be a currency.
3. 2008 said diversification was a marketing tool. Kindly comment…
4. April 20 is coming up soon, what are your catnip plans for the day?
Yo, Carl, thanks for the comment!
1. Yes, it’s finite (or more accurately: an instrument with a fixed rate of supply). Yes, the more people who use it, the more valuable it is, same as for email and Facebook. Ponzis, funnel money to the top, Bitcoin doesn’t. Ponzis stop being valuable when newcomers participage, Bitcoin won’t stop being valuable/useful and won’t go to nil once all Bitcoin has been mined, nor when market saturation has been reached. Ponzis are centrally orchestrated, bitcoin is decentralised.
2. I’ll concede: Bitcoin is not/may not be a currency (I think it’s a new thing altogether, but easy to think of as a currency). It could have been just cold hard luck that it outperformed many other assets. There might be correlation to other resource classes, I haven’t got any data on it, but worth exploring, yeah.
3. Not one investment strategy/asset allocation will be universally applicable. On a long enough timeline and to counter risk, diversification is required. The diversified investments made during the 2008 crash are doing pretty well today ;-)
4. ?????
Hi Werner, great site with good content, I will definitely be back! I’m a newbie trying to understand the in’s and out’s of crypto.
Two questions:
(1) is the best way to buy Bitcoin in South Africa through Luno?
(2) If I want to trade other crypto currencies (other than BTC or Ether) would I have to create an account with an international exchange? If so, which exchanges would you recommend? And do I need to open a new wallet and transfer my Bitcoin across in order to do this?
Hey David, thanks so much for the kind words!
To answer your questions:
1. Luno is by far the easiest and most reliable way to do so in SA (I should know, I’ve been working at Luno since 2015). As with most things: start small as you learn how things work. Use the Luno Wallet if you want to buy a small amount of Bitcoin and then graduate to the Luno Exchange once you become more familiar with things :-)
2. Yes, you would need to use another platform. My suggestion is to use the one with a high daily trading volume (you can look that up on CoinMarketCap — here it is, for instance, for Dash: https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/dash/#markets). Of course you can’t use the DASH/KRW (Korean won) pair, but you can trade DASH/BTC :-) I haven’t ever met anyone who works at Poloniex or Bitfinex; they’re a bit too secretive for my liking, so I don’t completely trust them (despite their long-running track record). I have met some of the senior management at Bitstamp and Kraken, so I’m more likely to use those (but they don’t always support all currencies). You will need to do normal KYC on those platforms, once you have an account, they’ll give you the right wallets.
Just very important: only send BTC from/to your Luno BTC wallet. Some people have accidentally sent Bitcoin to other wallet addresses (Bitcoin Cash or Bitcoin Gold or Bitcoin-whathaveyou). If you do so, the money is effectively lost.
Happy trading!
I am very impressed with your report. I am wodering if criptocarency exchanges have maturay to recover koins that are send to wrong adress. For example. If I by error transfer from Bitconnect 4 BCT to my wallet on CEX.io for Bitcoin Cash is that money lost or can it be recovered. CEX told me that I lost that money! If that is the case why would anybody invest?
Hey Mirjana,
It’s a technology, and as with any technology, it improves over time, so in future there may be mechanisms for recovery. If you send money (with a bank transfer) to the wrong person, you also can’t recover it (without the recipient’s consent). If you’re trying to send BTC to, say, an ETH address, your sending wallet (if it’s Luno) will tell you that it’s not a BTC address. But for now, double check each time before you send currencies.
Also, stay away from Bitconnect. It’s a scam.