Speak with any finance expert and they'll tell you the key to long-term wealth is asset accumulation.

This is for two reasons. First, assets earn you money while you sleep and, second, they usually appreciate the longer you hold on to them.

A house will be worth more in twenty years than it is today if past performance is anything to go by. Likewise, a bar of gold will be too.

Our finance expert should also tell you to invest in assets that pay you income, like a business, rental property or a dividend stock.

Owning an income-paying asset usually requires an upfront investment. To own a piece of a business you either need capital to buy into it or time and sweat equity to build it. Likewise, owning rental property requires either a large cash lump sum or a long-term mortgage.

In other words, acquiring physical assets requires time, effort and/or capital.

Intangible digital assets are a new investing opportunity

We're in a period of accelerated change and are deeply entrenched in the digital revolution which started in the 1990s and has many decades more to play out.

We're in the era of what MicroStrategy CEO, Michael Saylor, calls the "dematerialization of industries." This is where individual products and entire industries are becoming digitised largely because of the iPhone.

"The iPhone has dematerialized everything you can hold in your hand. Books, cameras, wallets, TVs etc have all dematerialized into the Apple network. Every wealthy person I know has an iPhone which means 90% of the wealth on the planet is going to get everything from the multi-trillion dollar Apple network."

Michael Saylor

Dematerialization is nothing new. The idea of buying a CD to listen to music or a DVD to watch a film seems ridiculous today. And, of course, no-one has sent a letter in decades.

Dematerialization is making intangible digital assets a new investing opportunity. The internet is creating new asset classes that perhaps can benefit everybody not just the wealthy.

Bitcoin is the ultimate digital asset

The current bitcoin narrative is it is the digital version of gold. This is because both gold and bitcoin share similar intangible properties. Tangibly they couldn't be further apart since gold is a lump of metal and bitcoin is lines of code. Intangibly they share qualities such as scarcity and fungibility which help to increase their value.

Michael Saylor believes bitcoin is a better asset than gold and has put his money where his mouth is. Earlier this year, MicroStrategy bought $425 million worth of bitcoin with its cash reserves. The reason being is that the cash was losing value each year - especially in the Covid era of quantitive easing - and bitcoin is proving to be an excellent store of wealth.

This meme video explains his reasons well.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EFwj-6RGGC8

Domain names are one of the oldest digital assets

Saylor obviously understands the long-term value of holding digital assets. MicroStrategy owns several premium domain names which the company has held for many years. Some of these include stategy.com, glory.com and speaker.com among others. Last year the company sold voice.com for a cool $30 million.

You don't have to own a premium domain name to consider it an asset. For example, take my site's URL. Given my name is the actual URL, chances are it will only have value to me and those who share the same name as me. Nevertheless, a digital asset it is.

It's not just TLDs that have value also. Social media handles and names can go for thousands on the black market. Social networks such as Twitter does not permit the trading of its usernames but that doesn't mean it doesn't happen.

Domain names are one of the oldest digital assets and despite the increase of new domain extensions (.co, .biz etc) and country-level domains (.co.uk, .de etc) they continue to hold and increase their value today.