1 best cryptocurrency to buy and hold forever
Forever is long. When you want to create lasting wealth for the rest of your life, and for your heirs, you’re looking for ultra-reliable wealth builders. Gold springs to mind. Property packages are another option. Some stocks may work, but you need to make sure that the companies you choose can last for decades.
These days you can add Bitcoin (BTC -1.07%) to the exclusive list. Yes that is correct. A small handful of the best cryptocurrencies can challenge gold and real estate when it comes to defending your hard-earned wealth over the long term, and Bitcoin remains the king of the hill it created in 2009.
Image source: Getty Images.
Bitcoin was born precisely for this purpose
Bitcoin was always meant to handle this job.
The system is explicitly compared to gold in the original white paper that describes Bitcoin’s inner workings and long-term goals.
“The steady addition of a constant amount of new coins is analogous to gold miners devoting resources to adding gold to circulation,” the document says. “In our case, it’s CPU time and power used.”
It is, really. At its heart, Bitcoin is a ledger system that can manage financial transactions, keeping track of each digital coin’s ownership situation on a shared global platform, protected by multiple layers of encryption. This blockchain beast doesn’t come with frills like smart contracts or lightning-fast transaction settlements. It’s about unbreakable security on a global scale, all managed by a community of developers with no central figure or controlling company.
The limit of 21 million Bitcoin
The network will stop generating more coins when 21 million bitcoins exist. With the current production rate and planned increases in mining difficulty, the last bitcoin should appear somewhere around the year 2140.
So there is a hard limit to the long-term supply of bitcoin units, comparable to how Earth has a limited supply of obtainable gold. You must take extraordinary measures to exceed the limit imposed by gold reserves.
I mean really extraordinary. Find a way to mine asteroids for more gold, develop some kind of nuclear fusion that creates gold atoms from other materials, or figure out how to separate gold from the planet’s core and deliver it to the surface. None of this will happen in our lifetime, and probably never will.
Likewise, bitcoin’s limit is absolute unless you get a majority of the core network to accept a different code base with different goals. In this case, you need a majority of bitcoin holders and miners to vote against their own financial interests. Otherwise, you can copy the bitcoin code and tweak it to your heart’s content, hoping that the new fork can win the favor of the crypto community and dethrone the original bitcoin.
If you build it, the challengers will come
This has been attempted a couple of times, but the results have been modest at best. A code fork created Bitcoin Cash (BCH -1.08%) in 2017, putting more control in the hands of large mining operations. Bitcoin Cash was worth $1,615 per coin when the leading crypto trading platform Coin base (COIN 0.05%) listed on December 19, 2017 – near the absolute peak of the 2017 cryptocurrency market. Today, the coin price is down to $111.
Other forks include Bitcoin gold (BTG -3.21%) (designed for graphics card mining, not specialized mining processors) and Bitcoin SV (BSV -1.77%), which uses a more radical version of Bitcoin Cash’s policy change. Bitcoin Gold has lost 97% of its original value and Bitcoin SV is down 41% in its three-year history. Despite the brutal market correction of 2022, the original Bitcoin has gained 165% in SV lifetime and 3% against Bitcoin Cash’s 97% crash:
Bitcoin price data from YCharts
And you could argue that every single altcoin on the market – more than 20,000 of them – wanted to beat Bitcoin at its own game in one way or another. So far they have failed. Bitcoin remains the most popular and valuable digital currency on the market.
What’s Next for Bitcoin?
The crypto market is evolving as we speak. In particular, last month’s FTX debacle may have inspired national and global lawmakers to take urgent action to regulate the crypto industry. When (not if) that happens, Bitcoin will have a firmer economic footing as the market begins to purge scammers and ridiculous crypto projects. Key leaders, such as Rostin Behnam of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and Gary Gensler of the Security and Exchange Commission, are leaning toward regulating Bitcoin as a gold-like commodity, not a stock-like value.
So I’m not winning points for originality here, but facts are facts. The original cryptocurrency continues to offer data security, long-term stability (with some temporary speed bumps along the way), and an unmatched store-of-value profile. Other names may rise for a while and then fall out of favor again, but this system was built to last.
Bitcoin is the cryptocurrency to put under your digital pillow for the next hundred years or more.
