There’s no denying it’s a divisive topic and we have some tough choices to make from a product perspective that the community will have ample input on.
A few points for the benefit of balance:
The one as yet proven use case of bitcoin (and perhaps other cryptos by proxy) is its open source and censorship-resistant ledger, meaning there is a public record of every transaction. This makes it a very poor choice of platform to perform your criminal activities on, because as soon as your addresses are linked with a fiat on-ramp there is an indelible link to the conduct.
In contrast, despite its 2018 correction BTC has outperformed the Venezuelan Bolivar over that period and helped to protect those people from hyperinflation. For them, it is a very real use case. This may not yet be of interest to developed economies but cue political instability in Spain, Italy and Greece in a big quantitive-easing mess and it’s easy to at least appreciate, if not actually buy into, the potential bitcoin has.
There’s a gold ETF in our universe - what’s your view on this? Would you be more comfortable seeing crypto in Freetrade if it was wrapped in an exchange traded vehicle (of which there are plenty and many more around the corner)?
I completely agree - we’ve built our proposition on cheap, long-term investing. I don’t think this approach should discriminate between asset classes, though. Trying to make short term profits with anything is dangerous, whether it’s the latest Silicon Valley IPO or ICO. Theories of asset allocation and diversification actually require that investors seek out opportunities that aren’t correlated, and so assigning a very small percentage of one’s portfolio to any speculative asset can have its benefits (I’ll drink to that).
I’ll happily concede that crypto as an industry is rife with fraud, volatility and complexity - but to some ‘normal’ people, so is the stock market. Freetrade’s job is to help them overcome this, and once we’re a bit further along on this mission there’s no reason why we can’t then do the same with crypto.