Jack's recent article on TheStreet.com lays out his case for considering cryptoassets as an alternative asset class for asset allocation modeling in your investment portfolio.

Please RSVP to Sabir Sultan, Events Coordinator, at crm2234@bn.com

In August of 2013, Jack Tatar began writing about bitcoin as an investment vehicle on Marketwatch.com. Specifically, he cited its value as an alternative asset class and began a real life experience investing his own retirement funds into the digital currency.

His ground breaking series and journey took him through some of the most volatile and early days of bitcoin. He has now collected those articles into a book called "What's the Deal with Investing in Bitcoin for Retirement?" and its exclusively available for FREE on this website. Please enjoy - .

Chris Burniske delivered the opening Keynote Speech at the 2017 Consensus: Invest conference. His ground breaking talk on Cruptoassets as a New Asset Class is available here.

You should also read his extensive tweet about the topic as part of his Twitter feed.

It finally happened!

On Friday, bitcoin dropped over 40% and media outlets all across the country were declaring the death of bitcoin. All those financial pundits and Nobel Prize winners (comfortably resting with tenure and pensions) who sounded the alarm about bitcoin were correct! They were all able to prove that you don’t have to have the faintest idea about a topic to simply bash it and predict its demise. It’s a great day for pessimists, “no men” and the status quo.

There are also many who are claiming that the crash was due to the fact that Time Magazine named bitcoin as its “Man of the Year” even though it has no gender and is in fact not even a person. Others point to the Sports Illustrated curse with its recent cover story about Tom Brady demanding his Super Bowl winners be paid in digital currency, including some ether and litecoin in addition to the majority being in bitcoin.

Even conspiracy theorists pointed to the fact that the crash happened at the exact moment when it reached $13,666, citing the combination of the unlucky and unholy number spelled disaster. And a disaster it was for all of those who flocked to buying bitcoin only weeks prior when it reached $10,000 after avoiding it for years. Many people who were optimistically planning to reap rewards from the new tax laws finally decided to invest money into something they not only didn’t understand, but also couldn’t reconcile why the technology had a capital B but the currency had a small b. They believed there was no need to understand anything about it; rather it was just going up and up and they wanted to jump on the bandwagon as well.

The weekend papers are sure to carry many “I told you so” experts including Warren Buffett who would again snicker at the absurdity of bitcoin along with announcing that he’s buying a mid-west footwear manufacturer that specializes in work boots for coal workers. “Everyone has two feet and needs coal,” Buffet said, also noting that he will rename the company ‘Dexter Energy Shoe Company.’

There will be many high fives from the investment analysts and there are reports that Jamie Dimon was seen celebrating in his Park Avenue penthouse early in the evening and later was consoling his daughter over ice cream at Serendipity because she had lost the allowance money that she had placed in bitcoin (she also lost a bet with her dad).

It’s sure to be a sad weekend for many.

Except for me. You see I’m an investor, not a gambler. I got into bitcoin many years ago not for the short-term profit, but because after educating myself on it, I believed it can change the world for the better. As an investor, I have a small amount in my overall portfolio; it fits my alternative asset sleeve and although I regularly have had to sell bitcoin to keep my portfolio allocation in line (because of gains, it was consistently growing from 10 to 25% of my portfolio and I would need to regularly rebalance to keep it at the desired 10% level), I plan on ‘hodling’ as much as I can of it as those of us who understand bitcoin and cryptoassets will do.

A fellow believer in bitcoin views the bitcoin bubble bursts (yes, this is not the first one) as reminding him of Michael Myers (the Halloween character not the Love Guru guy) who gets shot over and over, and still returns to terrorize others (in bitcoin’s case, it’s the status quo it loves to scare, not teenage babysitters).

For me, I’d rather view bitcoin not as a person but as an idea. Unlike people, ideas don’t die. They’re only limited by the faith than we put into them.

So, let’s wait and see what happens on Monday, because while America enjoys its weekend off, the world continues to trade digital currencies and as has happened after every other bitcoin bubble burst, it quickly returns to new highs.

Maybe this time is different. I have faith that it is.

Special thanks to @BitcoinMktJrnl for the photo of Chris Burniske's presentation at Consensys:Invest

Hear the recent podcast from 'The Investor's Field Guide' that features Chris Burniske's cryptoasset valuation techniques.

This episode is a continuation of the Hash Power series. It is the first of what we will call a Hash Power single—a series of conversations each with a single guest on a specific topic. In this case my guest is Chris Burniske, and the topic is cryptoasset valuation. This conversation is loaded with information, I think you are going to love it.

Chris recently released book called Cryptoassets, which is a must read for those interested in this field. Chris was at one point the only traditional buy side analyst covering bitcoin, and is now a partner at a new crypto firm called Placeholder. Chris has developed new frameworks for evaluating and valuing cryptocurrencies, marrying techniques and ways of thinking for several different asset classes to assess the newest asset class. Chris prefers the term cryptoassets because as you’ll hear, several of these tokens aren’t really currencies at all. We discuss the differences between cryptocurrencies, cryptocommodities, and cryptotokens. We begin our conversation with a deep dive into the equation of exchange, which Chris has been using as a starting point for understanding utility value.

Using excerpts from their book, "Cryptoassets: The Innovative Investor's Guide to Bitcoin and Beyond" authors Burniske and Tatar attack the misguided and distracting misconceptions about cryptoassets.

In a recent post in Coindesk, authors Chris Burniske and Jack Tatar discuss the commonly held misconceptions about cryptoassets.

From post:

This has been a breakout year for crypto assets, but not so long ago we were thickly in "blockchain, not bitcoin" season.

When we began work on our book, the consensus play seemed to be stripping the native assets out of blockchains and privatizing these originally open networks.

With the book, we set out to make a stand for public blockchains as the more important innovation, to confront the misguided (and persistent) claim that crypto assets are elaborate scams, and to reassure macroeconomists that not all crypto assets are currencies.

Chris Burniske has just released a ground breaking study on how to value cryptoassets. Access his study here.

Recently, an increasing number of crypto market participants and observers have become interested in a framework for valuing cryptoassets. Over the years many a dinosaur has proclaimed bitcoin valueless, an asset worse than tulips (at least with tulips you got a flower). Now they’re trying to figure out how valuable these assets really are. That’s a big win for the magic internet money community.

In this piece I share some early attempts at crypto valuations to give perspective on how early we still are, then discuss the theory I’m currently using and why, before walking through a fictional bandwidth coin valuation that includes a link to the actual model.

To celebrate the launch of our book and site, site visitors are welcome to download a free eBook of "What's the Deal with Bitcoins?'

In 2013, when there was little awareness or understanding by the general public about Bitcoin and the concept of digital currency, a small publisher took the leap of faith to produce a book about this new concept. "What's the Deal with Bitcoins?" was written by Jack Tatar and Ryan Lancelot and although it wasn't a chart buster on the best selling lists, it put a stake in the ground about what Bitcoin was, how it is/was created and what the long term prospects for it are. It became one of the first books ever written on the topic and along with a revision of it a few years ago, it still stands as a historical record that is required reading for any one interested in the topic of Bitcoin, cryptoassets and how it will change the world.

To celebrate the publication of Jack's new book, "Cryptoassets: The Innovative Investor's Guide to Bitcoin and Beyond", the publisher of Jack's first book on Bitcoin, People Tested Media is graciously providing free access to the ebook version of this ground breaking book to all of our site visitors.

Download the ebook here and feel free to pass it on to anyone interested in understanding the beginning of Bitcoin and get your copy of "Cryptoassets" to understand more about what may be the most important technological innovation of our lifetime.

As the cryptoasset markets develop we’ll see many booms and busts as enthusiasm waxes and wanes. Waxing and waning is all part of riding a rocket to the moon.

Bitcoin has been through a few boom-bust cycles already, most notably the waxing enthusiasm leading into late 2013, when bitcoin first broke $1,000, followed by the painful waning that lasted until January 2015 and bitcoin’s bottom at $175. With bitcoin now pushing towards $4,000, up nearly 4x in 2017 alone, we are once again in a period of waxing enthusiasm.

For the cryptoassets that have actual utility value, this waxing and waning pattern will create a price chart that resembles a familiar pattern: the J-curve.

In private equity, the J-curve refers to a portfolio’s cash flows, while in economics it is commonly used to describe the effects of currency devaluation on the national deficit. In crypto, a new J-curve is born.

TO READ THE REST OF ARTICLE ON CHRIS BURNISKE"S MEDIUM, click here

After suffering a 50% drop in his investment account, Jack Tatar writes of how his patience in having bitcoin in his retirement account "paid" off when two years later, it was the performing asset in his account.

In 2013, I posed a question that seemed out of character (many also said that it was "irresponsible") for a financial journalist. The question was "Do Bitcoins Belong in Your Retirement Account?"

I asked this question based not entirely on speculation, but with an eye on prudent asset-allocation strategies. It was my belief at the time that since bitcoins had a dollar-denominated value and were trading on worldwide exchanges, they could be considered an investable asset.

For the full article that ran on Marketwatch.com, click here.

In June 2016, ARK Invest and Coinbase produced a ground-breaking report that sought to explore the merit of bitcoin as the first of its kind in a new asset class—cryptocurrency—distinct from all other asset classes. Universally, we think traditional asset classes must meet the requirement of investability. However, traditional asset classes then differ in their politico-economic features, correlation of price movements, and risk-reward profiles.

Chris Burniske was a co-author (along with Adam White) of the ground-breaking report, which is available through the ARK Invest site here.

In May of 2014, Jack Tatar made the decision to invest his retirement funds into bitcoin. He discusses his rationale and his actions which included making a real life investment of $25,000 and then telling of his journey on Marketwatch.com

“Practice what you preach” was the Golden Rule in my parent’s house. These days, this adage seems less a rule and more a relic of the past.

Clearly few of our national leaders follow this rule. The same could be said of our most highly valued business leaders as well.

Whatever happened to the law that a celebrity couldn’t endorse a product unless that celebrity really used that product? Clearly that's gone the way of Don Draper's career and Orson Welles's need not to drink a wine "before its time.”

As those who read my articles may or may not be aware, I've written about bitcoins both in articles on MarketWatch and as a co-author on one of the first books to examine the topic, "What's the Deal with Bitcoins?"

This is an article that Jack Tatar published on Marketwatch.com on August 29, 2013. It discusses the potential of incorporating bitcoin into one's retirement account.

For years, investment firms and professionals have advocated the need to include a small percentage of high risk and potentially high reward assets into your retirement portfolio. The thinking is that including a small percentage of your overall asset allocation (from 5% - 10%) into these assets can provide high potential returns with only a small impact on your portfolio if the risk becomes too great.

As Brad Zimmerman writes on the Nasdaq.com website, "the general rule of thumb with alternative investing, according to Investopedia, is no more than 10 percent of your portfolio should go towards these investments."

For the full article, click here.