Thirteen years ago, Bitcoin started to show up in the financial media. Soon, there were other crypto-currencies. Today, there are hundreds. This delighted younger investors, as well as younger advisors, as it was something new that older investors and older advisors could never understand nor appreciate. Annoyed, I decided to make a deep-dive into the subject.

My first conclusion was that, except for criminals, there was little that bitcoin could offer that the dollar could not do. Later, I took a deeper-dive and enrolled in the Nasdaq Advisory Academy to study digital assets and learned the many advantages of the blockchain, which is a glorified accounting system. The problem was that each accounting system required a dedicated crypto-currency, which explains why there were so many crypto-currencies. Now, there are reports of newer blockchains that can use multiple crypto-currencies, which would be great improvement.

True Believers (read: younger investors) bid up the price of a Bitcoin, for example, to over $61 thousand each in 2020, before falling below $17 thousand . . . a huge drop. Older advisors just chuckled!

As a former skeptic on Bitcoin, I’m concerned it is suffering from “guilt-by-association” with FTX, the Bahamian-based dealer of crypto-currencies. There are many reasons to distrust crypto-currencies. The current collapse of FTX should not be one of them. To forgo the opportunities of blockchain because of its association with crypto is “throwing the baby out with the dishwater.”

Disclosure: I have never invested a penny into any crypto-currency and believe it is still much too early to even consider.