Authored by Mac Slavo via SHTFplan.com,
If the price action in crypto currencies over the last several months has proven anything, it’s that the blockchain has gone fully mainstream with global investors, major financial institutions and governments showing significant interest in the space. While a number of blockchain projects are moving onto the stage, the primary focus for investors has been Bitcoin, which has seen an increase of over 1,600% in 2017. And according to Frank Holmes, there is much more to come.
In an interview with SGT Report, Holmes, the Chairman of Hive Blockchain Technologies, the world’s only publicly traded blockchain mining company explains that, while roughly 78% of the available 21 million Bitcoins, or about 16.4 million, have been mined up to this point, there are probably only about 10 million coins in actual circulation around the world because somewhere on the order of 25% have been lost forever due to misplaced wallet access keys and other issues. Moreover, of those 10 million or so available coins, it has been widely reported that about 1000 “whales,” or high net worth investors, own some 40% of the coins, creating a scarcity in the market that has left millions of global investors chasing a limited supply of BTC.
Holmes suggests that this limited availability works to the advantage of cryptocurrency miners who use expensive computer hardware mining rigs to process transactions on the blockchain, because with so much investment capital moving into the space they can hoard the coins they mine and sell into the market during price spikes while loading up on more coins when markets dip. Hive currently mines Ethereum, Ethereum Classic, Bitcoin and will soon move into Litecoin and other popular cryptocurrencies using the same strategy:
We’re hoarding the coins… we mine virgin coins and in fact we are getting offered premiums for our coins because they’ve never been tainted.
We never buy the coins… anytime it has a huge surge we will sell one, two or three percent… and as soon as it corrects we just mine more and replenish ourselves…
We want to wait until we get at least 20,000 coins and then we can turn around and use our quant models, so we’re doing things very unique…
Most crypto currencies have a maximum supply of coins that can ever be mined. As Bitcoin demonstrates, a percentage of those already-mined coins will be lost. Another percentage will be locked up by high net worth and long-term investors. These mechanics create a situation where, perhaps only a little over half of the actual listed circulation of coins is actually circulating.
With this being the case it’s not difficult to see why, as tens of billions of dollars, and perhaps even trillions as has been suggested by investment gurus, continue to pile into these assets, prices for top tier crypto currencies could continue to rise exponentially in coming months and years.