Asset Classes

Every six months or so, I re-balance my retirement portfolio. It's not much, but I do it to keep each investment in correct proportion. One of the asset classes is a commodity. For the first time, I considered bitcoin or some portion of bitcoin and gold as the commodity. 

As institutional investors start to buy bitcoin as part of their investment strategy, it's an interesting consideration. Bitcoin is increasingly in the news, both for and against. Either way, the mindshare is growing. And clearly growing enough I seriously considered it.

Here's a transaction from when I was at tor:

OrderID: 6123fb1f-87b6-4b8e-be46-3e4f1f71a4d5
EventID: 08e723d5-e70f-44f5-8e65-649bafa2be96
DestAccount: 1Gts1gYm9XvJCn338zL8ySjMdUeMPSzHyq
QuoteID: fa7a2e41-e882-4800-9c2e-04b7491ab458
User: SYSTEM
DestExchange: btc
eventtype: Order executed
EventSentAt: 1350318177.91
APIResponse: {'BTC': 16.125509999999998}
FundsSent: $192.02 USD

Here's how it looks on the blockchain. Unfortunately, blockchain.com takes today's price and assumes it is accurate for the time of the transaction (2012-10-15). As you can see above, someone donated 16.1255 BTC to tor, or $192.02 USD. It's not the $460k blockchain.com claims. I think we held it in BTC and I bought some stickers with it-I think that's the second transaction you see when the money moves out of the wallet.

The point isn't about the value of btc over time. It's that after 8 years, I seriously thought about buying some BTC as part of my portfolio for the commodity asset class. In the end, I didn't do it. I bought a commodity ETF, as there was no easy way to buy a crypto currency ETF.

Maybe next year.