INVESTING IN CRYPTOCURRENCYES: BITCOIN - “RAT POISON” OR NEW ASSET CLASS?

Abstract

Although the world of finance has been existing for only ten years, the fact is that Bitcoin (BTC) has unstoppably triggered significant changes in the global financial market and has opened up numerous controversies. There is debate over whether BTC could become a new global currency that will not be subject to inflation or central bank influence. At the same time, decentralization and lack of regulations, which were considered a major asset, were characterized as the main cause of the high volatility of BTC, whose price depends solely on the supply-demand ratio. Like every time, when it comes to revolutionary technologies and issues of their impact on the world of finance, the public is divided, this time into BTC pessimists and BTC optimists. The former claim that BTC is broken and will suffer an inevitable and spectacular collapse, calling it "rat poison". However, optimists are of the view that the BTC era is just beginning and that it will change its payment method, economy and even politics around the world, and they consider it a new asset class worth investing in. In the midst of all these discussions around BTC, there seems to be no topic that is more media-covered, but less discovered. The aim of this paper is to come to the truth by analyzing recent scientific papers dealing with this issue, that is, to try to answer the research question: is BTC a "rat poison" or a new asset class worth investing in?