What Concerns Investors About Bitcoin?

In newsletter Vol 3, №2 we asked you to share your concerns about Bitcoin in a single question survey which is still open for your responses. For those of you who are not a current holder of Bitcoin, we asked what scares you most about it? For those who are already holders of Bitcoin, we asked you what stops you from buying more? Thank you to all of you who responded. In this newsletter we go through the initial results and also provide some answers to your concerns — in effect we hope to demystify Bitcoin for you.

Top Line Findings

This newsletter goes twice a month to over 10,000 people who are accredited investors. It also goes to a large number of institutional investors and even more family offices. For this survey we received back a statistically significant number of responses. We have not found significant differences in how various types of investors responded, and we saw little geographic variation.

What stands out for us is that a lot of concerns that we included in the survey received votes including a couple that were trojan horses to see if people understand what Bitcoin really is. We added them because we wanted to see if the fear, uncertainty and doubt (FUD) that others are spreading about Bitcoin might be hitting home. Some of it clearly is.

The other top line finding is simply the breadth of concerns getting votes. This can be read in several ways. Firstly, there may be a lot of legitimate concerns. Secondly, different investors may be concerned about different things. Thirdly, Bitcoin may simply be a confusing asset class with lots of chatter and lots of FUD — much of it being spread by people on the short side of the trade. We have demonstrated in years gone by, that uncertainty chills investment. Other research, such as the very good Bitwise study on US CFA’s and Registered Investment Advisors show that more than 90% of those important players in the US investment scene have yet to place a first Bitcoin trade for themselves or their clients. When Bitcoin is performing as the world’s highest performing asset, that looks like FUD to us. Said the other way, it does not look like an economically rational outcome.

So let’s go through the top 7 concerns one by one (We will hold a future webinar to go through all of the concerns in greater…