Bitcoin surges past $20,500

Recently, it seems as if every other day another big name in the traditional finance space is talking about Bitcoin. Just yesterday, Ruffer Investment Company Limited, an investment manager with shares listed on the London Stock Exchange, disclosed its new Bitcoin strategy. Ruffer said that it had added Bitcoin to its Multi-Strategies Fund, primarily as a defensive move against the "continued devaluation" of fiat money and now holds roughly 2.5% of its assets in BTC.

Perhaps even more significantly, it was reported on 11 December that Massachusetts-based insurance firm MassMutual had bought $100mln in Bitcoin for its general investment account and there are many more similar examples.

One can imagine that insurance firms and pension funds will never invest large amounts, in percentage terms, of their assets in Bitcoin but it would only require a small number of such institutions to change their stance on crypto to cause a seismic rise in the price of Bitcoin.

It looks like 2021 will be a big year for Bitcoin but I would also say that it is not done with 2020 yet.

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“We see this as a small but potent insurance policy against the continuing devaluation of the world's major currencies. Bitcoin diversifies the company's (much larger) investments in gold and inflation-linked bonds, and acts as a hedge to some of the monetary and market risks that we see.” - Ruffer Investment Company Limited statement. cointelegraph.com/...