What is all the buzz about Bitcoin these days? It’s evolved from a techie’s dream to a legitimate mainstream investment product.

But why?

Many believe Bitcoin is so popular due to the solution it provides to the centralization of the world’s financial system. Not only does it create a single, global currency that is digitally protected on the blockchain, but it allows less developed countries to gain access to previously unattainable wealth.

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There are a ton of other reasons why Bitcoin is popular too. But the majority of these reasons all revolve around the ongoing secular shift towards an entirely digital world.

As fiat currencies continue to suffer from inflation and devaluation, cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin may be here to create a new financial standard.

Bitcoin has steadily gained popularity for a number of reasons.

First and foremost, without beating around the bush, Bitcoin has made a lot of people very wealthy. If you were one of the lucky ones to buy into Bitcoin when it was trading for only a few dollars, then you are sitting pretty right now if you held onto your coins.

Bitcoin is also edgy. It is anti-establishment, anti-corporate, and is an end to end digital solution for finance. There are few systems more archaic and outdated than the financial system, and Bitcoin is taking the power out of the hands of the wealthy and handing it back to individuals.

Perhaps the most alluring thing about Bitcoin to investors is its deflationary nature. There are only a maximum of 21 million Bitcoins that can ever be mined, and nearly 19 million are already in circulation. This gives Bitcoin a scarcity that will likely always make it popular amongst crypto investors.

As supply continues to fall, the demand for Bitcoin should follow the basic laws of supply and demand and push the price of Bitcoin even higher. 

But as a major disclaimer, while I personally think Bitcoin will continue to go up in value in the future, nobody knows for certain what will happen.

It’s difficult to pinpoint exactly what made Bitcoin so popular. It was the original cryptocurrency and the leader of the digital finance revolution. As the popularity of the cryptocurrency market also rose, Bitcoin has always been hailed as the eventual replacement for fiat currencies. 

There is also an air of mystery that surrounds Bitcoin. People have become obsessed with its founder, a person or group who goes by the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto. This unknown quality about the token has done more to attract people to Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. 

Finally, Bitcoin is seen by many as a potential to make life-changing wealth. The token’s value in US dollars has already gone from a few pennies to an all-time high price of just over $67,000 at one point. And there is no telling where Bitcoin will go in the future, but there is a wide range of estimates from $100,000 per Bitcoin to over $1 million in the next decade. 

If it is difficult to pinpoint what made Bitcoin so popular, it is even more difficult to determine when it became so popular.

Whether it was the seizure of the dark web site Silk Road or the hack of early Bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox, the first real headlines that involved Bitcoin were all negative. If you were to read those headlines, you would probably have a pretty negative impression of Bitcoin yourself. And I really wouldn’t blame you.

Other early milestones for Bitcoin include being accepted by Microsoft as a form of payment in 2014 and being on the cover of the Economist magazine in 2015. Bitcoin was gaining real legitimacy in the financial world, but the non-crypto world still believed it to be linked to organized crime. 

Perhaps it was another negative headline that really grabbed people’s attention in 2018: the price of Bitcoin literally fell by 80% within one year. Never before had we seen an asset with such volatility.

A lot of people lost interest in the project, calling it a bubble that had popped. But then a funny thing happened. Bitcoin rebounded from its 80% loss and returned even stronger than ever.

Major securities exchanges around the world began trading Bitcoin ETFs and major payment networks like Square and PayPal actually began to accept Bitcoin as a form of payment. Bitcoin was no longer volatile, it was resilient and legitimate. 

Perhaps no one person made Bitcoin as popular as its founder, Satoshi Nakamoto. Many have tried to seek out who this person or group is, but everyone has failed. The mystery that surrounds Nakamoto’s true identity is something that only adds to the allure of the Bitcoin world. 

Other popular figures that supported Bitcoin over the years include Tesla CEO Elon Musk, early co-founders of Facebook the Winklevoss Twins, and current Block CEO and former Twitter CEO, Jack Dorsey. There is a large contingent in the tech community who support Bitcoin, including major investors like Marc Andreessen of Andreessen Horowitz. 

The country of El Salvador made global headlines in 2021 when it became the first country to make Bitcoin a legal tender. Several other countries have also reportedly been interested in following suit, but the volatility of the crypto markets last year likely caused them to hold off. 

Related Financial Geek Article: Is Bitcoin Legal in Canada? Here are the Facts

There are so many different reasons why Bitcoin has become as popular as it is in our world today. For starters, it is a scarce asset with only 2 million or so Bitcoin left to be released (as of 2022). It is a mysterious asset with a mysterious creator, and its message of decentralization is looking to disrupt the global financial system. 

Finally, and above all, Bitcoin holds the potential to make its holders very wealthy. It is a currency, a store of value, and a hedge against big corporations. Bitcoin had started a digital revolution that looks like it is about to change the world forever. 

Geek, out.

Noel is the founder and main contributor for his blog - Noel's passion for personal finance has helped him amass over 600k readers to his Financial Geek blog.

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