Bitcoin has been down for a while now and the market has behaved as expected. The tiniest sniff of uncertainty often leads to a haemorrhaging in the billions.
What do you do when things get this red?
If you value what Ark Invest’s Cathy Wood has to say, hold on to your Bitcoins!
Cathy wood has been a polarizing figure for the past two years. The Chief Executive Officer and Chief Investment Officer at Ark Invest has borne the brunt of being a leader in an industry full of fickle commentators and investors. Back in the pandemic's lockdown and toilet paper rush stage, she was the investing goddess whose words were almost law.
Then the pandemic fog began to clear and her tech stocks began taking hits and unfortunately, so did she.
Cathy Wood’s resilience and credentials, not to mention her fascinating high risk - high reward strategy, still make her a force in this industry and worth listening to.
So when Cathy has an Ark Invest sponsored Sitdown alongside Elon Musk, Jack Dorsey, and Square Crypto’s Steve Lee; and tells you not to get off the bitcoin bus at the next bear stop, you might want to take a seat and listen.
Here are 3 reasons why Cathy wants you to stay involved in Bitcoin.
Bitcoin will be great for the Environment
This is a departure from all that “Bitcoin consumes too much energy and is terrible for the environment” talk we were all reporting about back in 2019. In fact, Elon Musk was almost going that direction in the Livestream before revealing that he would be holding on to his Bitcoins.
Cathy argues that Bitcoin is already more environmentally friendly compared to traditional gold mining and the traditional financial systems we have all been used to. So concerns about the environment when it comes to bitcoin will be fully debunked in due time.
Cathy Wood and Ark Invest have been consistent in offering the environment counter-narrative.
When they argue that the computational energy required to secure Bitcoin will ruin our planet, the rebuttal is that crypto mining, energy storage, and AI technologies continue to converge. This conversion will lead to an acceleration in the uptake of renewable energy.
Cathy wood said this back in 2021 and even then, she was ready to drop receipts.
2. Bitcoin will be woker than your politicians and activists
At a time of loud calls for social justice and paradigm shifts, bitcoin could save the world. Cathy articulated this brilliantly on that Livestream;
“Many institutions when they think of social they think of diversity, equitable pay, and all of that; but from our disruptive innovation point of view, social is much more than that. For us its about saving lives, autonomous technology, and allowing access to payment technologies”
You are used to social activism taking the form of hashtags, emojis, and flags in your bio. Cathy’s take goes deeper than that. She goes on to articulate a detailed “how”. The how is in form of making remittances more affordable to people in distant countries. If you live in a westernized bubble as we all do, you wouldn’t know that remittances form a big part of many countries’ GDP.
Did you know that 24 percent of El-Salvador’s GDP relies on remittances?
No wonder the country has recognized bitcoin as legal tender already. Bitcoin can save the global remittance industry which transacts about 700 billion, a lot in fees.
It goes further than just remittance issues, we also have populations in South America, Asia, and Africa who live under the thumb of autocratic regimes where financial inclusion is almost a slur to those in power.
Then we have economies that just suck!
Places where the inflation is in triple digits and you would have to be a billionaire in your local currency, to be able to own a car.
Bitcoin can save millions of people who live in these environments that have depressed their purchasing power. That would be one of the most remarkable feats ever when it comes to social responsibility.
3. Bitcoin will change financial governance for the better
Cathy decried the opaqueness of the current financial system and offered the bitcoin ecosystem as a solution. This is hard to argue against because doing so, would be questioning the validity of the entire concept of decentralization. You and I know that we are way past that in 2022.
As Cathy mentioned, a vital piece of bitcoin’s governance structure is its core developers. Cathy has met many of them and according to her, they know their stuff. They are vast both in terms of tech and in terms of world economic history.
In her words “They do believe that they are on a noble mission. They could be paid a lot more than they are being paid right now if they worked at Google or Facebook but they’ve chosen this sense of purpose for a noble goal. They all come from incredibly strong technology backgrounds as well as a good understanding of economic history especially monetary history.”
If you don’t care for the passion and vision of its core developers, then refer back to the backbone concept that led to the development of bitcoin and blockchain technology, trust. Trust is a very human need.
Traditional transaction systems have been falling short of this basic human need, and because nature abhors gaps, we now have blockchain technology. Lest we forget, blockchain technology is a combination of cryptography and distributed networking that works to allow people, businesses, and governments to transact with trust.
Bottomline
Cathy Wood made these arguments in mid-2021 and they still hold true to this day. Despite the BTC price tanking for the last few weeks, there are good reasons to weather the storm long-term and not to listen to every fickle “crypto YouTuber” out there who’s telling you to cash out and hide your money under the pillow. Pay attention to the technology and the value it brings, not influencers.
Any influencer telling you that BTC will be worth nothing by the end of the year is just as crazy as anyone telling you it will be worth $200,000 a coin.
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