April 16, 2021 - Bitcoin market capitalization reaches $1.1T with a value to USD at $61,678. Check this list of “experts” who said it would never go as high as $20K again. Will it go higher, who knows, but it is driven by supply and demand. Is there a collection of entities that hold enough BTC to influence the value. Of the top 10 holders of Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto holds 1.1 million. This is significant given there will only ever be 21 million coins. From the 10 ten holder list, it is interesting that number 2, Bulgaria, and number 4, The FBI, are governments.
March 13, 2021 - This first reference is by Ben Shapiro. Shapiro is not known for discussing Bitcoin, I only know that I respect Shapiro and want to hear what he has to say. I’ll summarize below.
Shapiro gives a nice whiteboard tutorial:
- Defining what fiat currencies are and how they work
- The history of money based on the gold standard
- A definition of Bitcoin and its history
- The concept that we rely on the power of government to support money
- Governments cannot control Bitcoin
- People could choose not to use Bitcoin and the value would plummet
- Who defines the value of the Doller and who defines the value of Bitcoin
- Cryptography, why Bitcoins cannot be duplicated or forged
- The role of Bitcoin miners and a bit about blocks in the blockchain
- Given supply and demand, Bitcoin is no different than Gold, except it is not a hard asset (I personally think it is a harder asset than gold)
- Elon Musk’s belief in Bitcoin is shown by the $!B Telsa invested in Bitcoin, over the purchase of US Bonds
Shapiro never states that he holds Bitcoin, yet I see an evolution in his thinking. One of his longtime sponsors is Birkshire Gold. Personally, I think diversifying your portfolio with some precious metals is a good idea and the same goes for Bitcoin.
Peter Schiff is in the business of selling gold. I get it, follow the money. It is not in his best interest to say anything positive about Bitcoin. Ben Shapiro on the other hand, is sponsored by Berkshire Gold and not by Coinbase or any of the crypto companies that I know of. That he would be neutral on Bitcoin I find interesting. Perhaps we can expect a new sponsor at The Daily Wire?
This quick read covers the production rate of bitcoin and also answers the question, what happens if you lose your Bitcoin private key?
KEY TAKEAWAYS
- There are only 21 million bitcoins that can be mined in total.
- Once bitcoin miners have unlocked all the bitcoins, the planet’s supply will essentially be tapped out.
- As of February 24, 2021, 18.638 million bitcoin have been mined, which leaves 2.362 million yet to be introduced into circulation.
- Once all Bitcoin has been mined the miners will still be incentivized to process transactions with fees.
Tracking Bitcoin with Google Sheets
Let’s say you want to create a spreadsheet and track Bitcoin. It might look like this.
Paste this in a cell to get the current value of bitcoin.
=1/GoogleFinance(“CURRENCY:USDBTC”)
GoogleFinance(“CURRENCY:USDBTC”) returns the number of coins you can buy for 1 US Dollar and you may want this, but to get the value of Bitcoin in US Dollars, take the inverse by adding “1/” to the front of the calculation. Now let’s make our sheet easier to understand, let’s name the cell “bitcoin”.
Pull down on Data, select Named Ranges
Select Add a range, select the cell with your Bitcoin formula, call it “bitcoin” and now anywhere in the sheet you want the value of Bitcoin you can use "=bitcoin.
For example, that $5 in bitcoin someone gave you when bitcoin was at $61,000 would look like:
=bitcoin * 0.00008196721
One last tip, remember “CURRENCY:USDBTC” from our Bitcoin formula? You can use other fiat-currencies and other crypto-currencies, give it a try.