1. GOLD MARKET
At a starting level, gold and bitcoin supporters believe in their preferred commodity as a means to protect their wealth from interfering government. Gold admirer place their trust in precious metals, and bitcoin lovers look to computational algorithms.

Both gold and bitcoins are considered as substitutes of currency, and thus good alternative investment options. Bitcoin is often touted as gold 2.0 as it essentially takes the appealing qualities of gold and digitises them.

If the proliferation of gold-bitcoin exchanges are anything to go by (that is, companies that have made it possible to exchange your physical gold for bitcoin), there’s a growing appetite for making the switch, and as such the gold market could quite easily lose some share to bitcoin bugs.

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2. E-COMMERCE MARKET
Bitcoins were mainly built for e-commerce. In2009, Satoshi Nakamoto introduced bitcoin, he explains: “Commerce on the Internet has come to rely almost exclusively on financial institutions serving as trusted third parties to process electronic payments. While the system works well enough for most transactions, it still suffers from the inherent weaknesses of the trust based model.”

These weaknesses include:

*The reversals or chargebacks to take place, even after product or service has been delivered, which is a risk to merchants.

*The limitations of true international transactions, due to the billions of adults excluded from modern forms of banking.

*The additional costs incurred as a result of the need for authorities and financial institutions to process transactions and payments, not only cutting into profit margins but making many low-cost products or services otherwise unviable for e-commerce

Bitcoins solves these issues and provides a mechanism for merchants and consumers to transact directly, irrespective of where they live in the world or what their local currency is. Bitcoin is the native currency of the Internet, the home of e-commerce.

3. Hedge Fund Market
Bitcoins has a huge and unidentified potential; a unique combination to attract hedge fund crowd. This is a market where bitcoin has already started to gain access. From last 2 to 3 years, bitcoins have seen significant interest - and investment - from dominant hedge fund players.

2013, Fortress Investments was the first investment company to list Bitcoin among the assets on its balance sheet, following a purchase of $20m in bitcoins.

Pantera Capital, another highly successful global macro-hedge fund investment firm, decided to change course and deal exclusively with Bitcoin. They are the majority partner of a Bitcoin hedge fund that includes other leading investment firms Benchmark, Ribbit Capital and Fortress.

This shift from these giant hedge fund players is a significant step in bitcoin’s move into the financial mainstream, and a move which will be eagerly monitored.

4. Remittance Market
In 2014, US$583 billions were moved across borders as remittance payments, out of which $436 billions were moved into developing countries, where recipients rely on the income of their migrant family members to sustain, in most cases.

People have limited options when it comes to send their money back home; restricted by the the likes of Western Union and MoneyGram that take high processing fees, eating away at desperately needed funds.

Remittance market is best positioned for bitcoin penetration. Using bitcoin as the preferred means to transfer money globally means little to no cost involved, preserving money, and almost instantaneous clearance too. And this is a movement being already being fuelled by businesses such as [url="https://www.bitssa.com"]BITSSA[/url] (Nigeria and Ghana).