Bitcoin and cryptocurrency are growing increasingly attractive to both millennials and gen Z, according to a new report.
Young People Love Bitcoin and Crypto
The data stems from news that Grayscale Investment Bitcoin Trust – a firm that focuses on both bitcoin and altcoin investments – is up there with companies like Apple and Amazon as the top enterprises to garner investments from younger generations. Grayscale ultimately beat out major tech conglomerates such as Microsoft and Netflix.
In addition, investing with Grayscale has proven more popular among younger people than garnering stocks from companies like Berkshire Hathaway, the Disney Corporation and Alibaba, based in China.
If there’s any truth to the idea that millennials love cryptocurrency, it’s no surprise that they wouldn’t be interested in investing in Berkshire Hathaway. The company’s head honcho Warren Buffett has been very critical of bitcoin in the past, explaining in a CNBC interview:
It’s a gambling device. There’s been a lot of fraud connected with it. There’s been disappearances, so there’s a lot lost on it. Bitcoin hasn’t produced anything. It doesn’t do anything. It just sits there. It’s like a seashell or something, and that is not an investment to me… I’ll tear off a button, here. What I’ll have is a little token… I’ll offer it to you for $1,000 and I’ll see if I can get the price up to $2,000 by the end of the day, but the button has one use and it’s a very limited use.
According to a report by investment platform Charles Schwab, shares in Grayscale are held by approximately 1.84 percent of millennials. This is higher than the figures of both Netflix and Microsoft, which had 1.58 percent and 1.53 percent millennial investors respectively.
It seems many young people hold more trust in cryptocurrencies given that they grew up during – or spent time affected by – the Great Recession of 2008. The financial crisis of that year resulted in the closure of many of the world’s leading banks and financial institutions, while manufacturing and other jobs that served as the backbone of things like America’s infrastructure collapsed and practically became non-existent overnight.
It appears many of these younger generations don’t trust banks to do their jobs following the fiasco of 11 years ago and believe crypto to be more trustworthy in that it doesn’t discriminate. Virtually anybody can use it granted they have the trading and technical skills along with access to cryptocurrency or bitcoin trading software to make things much more convenient.
The Way People Invest Is Changing
Barry Silbert – founder and chief executive of the Digital Currency Group – explained in a statement:
There is a strong generational shift in how individuals are approaching investing. We strongly believe that investments in gold will be reallocated to bitcoin as baby boomers begin transferring their wealth to a younger generation of investors – one that wasn’t raised on the gold standard.
