Bart Smith, the head of digital asset trading at the Susquehanna International Group, believes that Bitcoin is the best investment for cryptocurrency traders because it has established use cases and has cemented itself as the currency of the internet.

According to CNBC, Smith believes that despite the bearish market, Bitcoin remains the best form of investment for cryptocurrency investors since there are people who are “functionally using” it.

“If you want to own the asset that you can actually use today and that people are functionally using, it’s Bitcoin,” said Smith on CNBC’s Fast Money Segment on June 10, 2018. “The use case for Bitcoin is valid today, which is the currency of the Internet.”

Smith believes that Bitcoin has clear established use cases which fundamentally separates it from other cryptocurrencies. He mentioned that when Bitcoin futures were released in 2017 “people got very excited about Bitcoin.” Smith, however, noted that people “got really excited about all these other tokens and use cases. And all of the sudden you saw all of these smaller tokens, as people got excited about them, massively outperform. We got way ahead or ourselves.”

While other blockchain networks and tokens have other use cases, creating smart contracts and attempting other technological advancements while in theory sound great, are extremely difficult in practice. He believes that they “aren’t coming anytime soon” and therefore sees the greatest practical value with Bitcoin.

Jimmy Song, a Bitcoin Educator, developer, and entrepreneur shared a similar opinion in one of his recent medium blog posts on Smart Contracts. He mentioned that smart contracts are actually not so intelligent and are in fact “pretty dumb.” Song appeared confident that it will take a while for smart contracts to “be more useful than they actually are.”

Bitcoin is currently valued at $6,425.03 as of June 11, 2018. Although Bitcoin has recently experienced a bearish market, Smith sees great potential with its underlying blockchain technology and its ability to transfer money fast and effectively in comparison to traditional systems. “They use Western Union, traditional banks; It is slow and it is expensive,” said Smith. “And there are people that can stop you from sending that money, whether that’s good or bad. With Bitcoin, I can send money. It’s fast. It’s cheap. And frankly, no one can stop me.”

It’s, therefore, no surprise that Thomas Lee, head of research at Fundstrat Global Advisor is also optimistic about Bitcoin’s future value. According to Bloomberg, he believes that Bitcoin’s value will increase by 270 percent and reach a value of $25,000 by the end of 2018.

Despite Smith and Lee’s positive outlook for Bitcoin’s future, Todd Colvin, an analyst at Ambrosino Brothers told CNBC’s Future Now segment that “after the move, we’ve seen it’s very difficult in the short term to be bullish.”

Bitcoin has even fallen below the $6,000 mark at the end of June several times. Colvin believes that with greater clarity on factors concerning security, regulation, and accessibility, the market could quickly shift from being a bearish to a bullish market. Greater transparency and security measures could encourage a more risk-averse crowd to invest in Bitcoin.

With cryptocurrency exchanges, Coinrail and Bithumb experiencing hacks just last month in June, Colvin believes that such flaws in security have pushed Bitcoin’s prices below $6,000 as investors have lost confidence in the market.

Apart from security issues, unclear regulations is also a large barrier to Bitcoin’s success.  “The government doesn’t really know how to define or quantify what Bitcoin is,” said Colvin. “They don’t call it a security, so it doesn’t fall under the SEC umbrella. It’s still very confusing.”

While there’s demand for Bitcoin, there’s also a lot of uncertainty around its longevity. Colvin argued that despite the established use cases, greater clarity is still required, especially in the short-run.

The post Wall Street Trader Confident that Bitcoin is the Best Investment for Cryptocurrency Traders appeared first on UNHASHED.

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