TOBAM investment thesis on Bitcoin can be summed up as follows: the theoretical and empirical characteristics of Bitcoin are such that it could potentially become a new store of value, a ‘gold 2.0’ so to speak.

To understand the roots of Bitcoin or the crypto-asset ecosystem and what place it could take in the long-run in the mainstream financial system, it is useful to remember Hayek thesis developed in his famous book the “Denationalization of Money” : a thought experiment of a competitive system of privately issued currencies rather than government monopolies. His thesis being that if a group of people benefit from a monopoly on money issuance, a day or another they will abuse the monopoly, this abuse resulting systematically in disastrous crisis. In order to avoid the crisis, we need to get rid of the monopoly .

Bitcoin has in fact been conceived to address certain shortcomings of traditional ‘fiat’ currencies, making it a hedge for its bearer.
In the era of Quantitative Easing and ever easing central bank policies, Bitcoin is considered by some as a compelling potential alternative to traditional stores of value.
Apart from its more fundamental investment case, Bitcoin is an extremely potent portfolio diversifier; its correlation to all the traditional financial assets is, on the medium term, non-significant.