Dreaming of... The Address Sky View Hotel, Dubai
Returns can be spectacular... but so can losses I am often asked about Bitcoin and whether it makes a good investment, so here’s the lowdown…
Dazzling Dubai, one of our favourite sunshine playgrounds, is a huge holiday success story. Just six decades ago it was a dusty Persian Gulf backwater. Why would you go there?
Today, thanks to some visionary leadership and prudent investment of oil money, it’s a premium, glittering and oh so desirable destination that offers... well, just about anything and everything.
And the novelty of skiing on real snow in the desert at Ski Dubai is hard to beat.
Dubai certainly does not do things by halves and its marketing tagline could easily be: bigger, better, bolder, brighter.
And that applies to its remarkable portfolio of luxury hotels.
Right at the heart of the action in Downtown Dubai lies the new-ish 169-room Address Sky View hotel.
There are many excellent reasons why you’ll want to stay here, but surely the foremost is the 230ft-long infinity pool located 720ft up on the Sky Deck bridge between the property’s twin towers?
By day, and especially at night, there are stellar views of the Burj Khalifa – at 2,722 ft the tallest building in the world – and Downtown Dubai, with an outdoor bar and the adjacent indoor CÉ LA VI restaurant and club lounge bar.
If heights aren’t your thing, there’s another pool with a swish (of course!) bar on Level 2. Appetites are amply
VISTA Downtown viewed from catered for with ‘global bistronomy ‘ at the multispace The Restaurant and the ‘open yet intimate’ The Lounge. There’s also a modern grab-and-go cafe and sweet indulgence at a patisserie.
A five-star Dubai hotel needs exceptional rooms and Address Sky View’s sizeable offerings ooze attention to detail, with biscotti and light grey colourways, floor-to-ceiling views of the Downtown Dubai skyscraper landmarks or the blue waters of
the Persian Gulf. Premium in-room amenities and tech come as standard.
If you can tear yourself away from that infinity pool, Downtown Dubai and the sky piercing Burj Khalifa (a must-visit) and the mesmerising displays at the Dubai Fountain
(also unmissable) are within walking distance, as is the stellar shopping at the Dubai Mall plus its aquarium, ice rink, kart racing, VR park, cinema and restaurants.
For added convenience, Dubai
International Airport is just a 15-minute drive by taxi and the nearest public beach is about 20 minutes away.
Reputedly, taxi drivers say the hotel entrance is slightly difficult to find. With luck, when you are due to leave and your cab fails to turn up, you’ll just have to stay another night...
The 230ft infinity pool is located 720ft up on a deck between twin towers
Bitcoin is just one of more than 4,000 cryptocurrencies available around the world. While many of them have little to no following or trading volume, some enjoy immense popularity among dedicated communities of backers and ‘investors’.
It is a form of digital money, meaning that unlike physical money, it is traded online across a computer network of thousands.
Because of this, it’s difficult to have a common record of all transactions, but a technology known as blockchain makes this possible.
Blockchain is a shared transaction record – it prevents anyone from ‘double spending’ Bitcoins and makes it hard for historical transactions to be altered.
Bitcoin was the first established cryptocurrency in 2009. Some of the other leading names are Ethereum, Litecoin and Cardano.
In the way gold is mined before it is melted and sold, cryptocurrencies are also mined – but this form of mining is of course digital, and involves computers solving increasingly complex mathematics problems. When problems are solved, Bitcoin is produced. But those problems increase in difficulty over time, which is why enormous amounts of energy and computational power are required to mine Bitcoin today.
The source code of the cryptocurrency means it is finite: only 21 million Bitcoins can ever be mined. To date, around 18.5 million have already been mined but the number in active circulation is considerably lower. The buying and selling of Bitcoins began in 2010 and in 2011, it reached parity with the dollar, with one Bitcoin worth $1.
As I write, the price of one Bitcoin has rocketed to over $50,000 – but the journey has been anything but smooth, with wild price swings in very short periods of time.
I don’t consider Bitcoin to be an investment because it doesn’t produce anything. A buy-to-let property is an investment because it produces a rental income, and buying shares is an investment because the company produces a profit and pays dividends.
Bitcoin, like gold, oil and grains, experiences price rises and falls based on supply and demand, which makes it a commodity.
The credibility of Bitcoin has been reinforced after Tesla and a number of respected hedge funds recently bought into it. We will also soon see PayPal and Square offering cryptocurrency products.
Nobody knows whether all 4,000 cryptocurrencies will last, but I think it’s fair to say that the future of Bitcoin looks much more secure after institutional investors got involved.
If you follow them and do the same, bear in mind that ‘volatility’ is the word most closely associated with Bitcoin’s value so far. Also be sure to read the Q&A below.
Search for The Money Planner Podcast to learn more about Cryptocurrency and investing.
I don’t think of it as an investment. To me, it’s more like a commodity