Recently, Fidelity Digital Assets (FDA) published a report called “Bitcoin First” and dedicated specifically to Bitcoin.
Summary
Fidelity: Bitcoin is superior money
Fidelity Digital Assets is the cryptocurrency section of financial giant Fidelity, and through this report, it wants to make it clear how Bitcoin is different from other digital assets.
The report is 26 pages long and was written by the FDA’s Director of Research, Chris Kuiper, and researcher Jack Neureuter.
The two explain that there are thousands of digital assets within the crypto ecosystem, and that in theory, these could compete with Bitcoin, which in some ways is the most “old-fashioned.”
But they also reveal that Bitcoin is “fundamentally different” from any other digital asset, as a monetary asset and store of value in the digital world.
Indeed, there may not even be a mutual interaction between Bitcoin and all other digital assets, to the extent that the rest of the crypto ecosystem meets different needs and solves problems that Bitcoin simply does not address.
So they explicitly call for evaluating all altcoins from a different perspective than the one used to evaluate Bitcoin.
In this regard they write:
“Bitcoin should be considered an entry point for traditional allocators looking to gain exposure to digital assets”.
Bitcoin should be viewed as an “emerging monetary good”, while altcoins as assets more akin to risk investments.
In fact, they conclude by saying that although many traditional investors believe Bitcoin may be supplanted by better technology alternatives in the future, in reality Bitcoin’s real breakthrough is not to be a superior payment technology, but “a superior form of money”.
And, to avoid misunderstanding, they explicitly add:
“As a monetary asset, bitcoin is unique”.
Bitcoin is unique
What the Fidelity Digital Assets report suggests is that altcoins are fundamentally technology projects tied to financial products and services, while Bitcoin is fundamentally and primarily money. This stark difference is also found in the distinction between Bitcoin’s technological layer (i.e. the protocol and network), and its financial layer (i.e. the BTC asset).
In other words, the BTC financial asset is unique, and completely different from all other digital assets, because it is simply a new form of money, superior to previous ones.
