Picture this. If you had put a small $100 stake in bitcoin in 2010, that investment would be up a whopping 8,097% today!

Bitcoin is a cryptocurrency. (Check out this write-up on cryptocurrencies from our friends at Investment U.) Essentially, bitcoin is a digital way to store and transfer value. You can easily exchange bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies with traditional currencies all over the world.

There will only ever be 21 million bitcoins. You can’t counterfeit them because everyone in the network has a copy of all transactions, and you can prove ownership using the blockchain and cryptography.

As I write this, each bitcoin is worth around $8,100. That’s up from $.008 in mid-2010.

Bitcoin is up 1,010% over the last 12 months. Competing token Ethereum is up 3,659% over the same period and now boasts a market cap of more than $35 billion.

Many people are drawn to the “decentralized” nature of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies – that is, the fact that they can be used like currency, but aren’t controlled by governments.

Big Bold Ideas

Some believe these “coins” will become the world’s new reserve currencies. Others are convinced that tokens like Ethereum will transform the way finance and the internet work. These are ideas with such big implications that most people have laughed them off over the years.

Yet the cryptocurrency market is on fire. The entire market’s value just surpassed $232 billion. Bitcoin accounts for around $138 billion of that total.

Thousands of bitcoin competitors have launched over the past few years.

The result is that bitcoin is no longer the only serious game in town. And more coins and tokens are launching every day.

ICO

This past summer, a startup called Brave raised $33 million in 30 seconds through an initial coin offering (ICO).

Brave’s token is called the Basic Attention Token (BAT). It aims to revolutionize the way advertising works so that it’s all powered by BAT and run on its proprietary web browser.