{"id":574435,"date":"2024-12-05T07:22:14","date_gmt":"2024-12-05T05:22:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/?p=574435"},"modified":"2024-12-05T07:25:03","modified_gmt":"2024-12-05T05:25:03","slug":"bitcoin-hits-100000","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/cryptocurrency\/574435-bitcoin-hits-100000.html","title":{"rendered":"Bitcoin hits $100,000"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

On Wednesday night in New York, the dreams of crypto\u2019s permabulls became reality: Bitcoin hit $100,000 (R1.82 million).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A monthlong rally has seen the largest and oldest cryptocurrency alternately approach \u2014 and then repeatedly shy away from \u2014 that most sought-after of round numbers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Spurring the moves: the digital asset industry\u2019s chest-thumping optimism that US President-elect Donald Trump would halt the tough government scrutiny that prevailed during his predecessor\u2019s administration and instead pursue policies and regulators friendly to the digital-asset industry.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Events on Wednesday provided concrete support for that enthusiasm, with Trump\u2019s nomination of the pro-crypto Paul Atkins to replace Gary Gensler at the US Securities and Exchange Commission.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cPaul Atkins was made for this job,\u201d Robinhood Markets Inc. legal chief Dan Gallagher said earlier on Wednesday at the firm\u2019s investor day in New York. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Gallagher, who in November\u00a0publicly withdrew from consideration\u00a0for the SEC job, said he expected Atkins to address the industry bugbear of\u00a0regulation by enforcement.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI think he\u2019ll do that on day one,\u201d Gallagher added.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A price of $100,000 pushes the market value of Bitcoin to just shy of $2 trillion and makes it a larger investment asset than all but a handful of public companies such as Nvidia Corp., Apple Inc. and Google parent Alphabet Inc.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And $2 trillion represents an amount bigger than the government bond\u00a0markets<\/a>\u00a0of nations like Spain and Brazil, and one approaching the market capitalization of the entire FTSE 100 Index of British stocks.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cBitcoin reaching $100,000 signals the next phase of the bull run, one that now appears resilient to anything but exogenous shocks,\u201d said Fadi Aboualfa, head of research at crypto custodian Copper Technologies Ltd.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Magnetic Target<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Even before Trump was elected president, many crypto-minded investors believed a\u00a0$100,000 price\u00a0was inevitable. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hedge-fund manager Anthony Scaramucci\u00a0predicted in September\u00a0that it would reach that milestone by the end of this year, and billionaire Michael Novogratz said as much in June. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Strategists at banks like\u00a0JPMorgan Chase\u00a0and Goldman Sachs made calls almost four years ago predicting it would eventually reach the six-figure milestone.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Born in the aftermath of the global financial crisis 16 years ago, Bitcoin was launched in 2009 by pseudonymous creator Satoshi Nakamoto as a peer-to-peer network free of government control. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Whether Nakamoto is a single person or a group has been subject of much\u00a0speculation\u00a0throughout Bitcoin\u2019s lifetime.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It took a 135% year-to-date rally for Bitcoin to reach $100,000, yet the original digital asset is no stranger to such eye-popping price movements. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The token, which ended the year 2010 at roughly 30 cents, rallied 157% last year after crashing 64% in 2022. It notched gains of 1,375% in 2017, 5,428% in 2013 and 1,317% in 2011. \u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Its march from mere pennies in its early years to $100,000 today required scaling a massive wall of worry \u2014 or what crypto traders refer to as \u201cFUD,\u201d short for fear, uncertainty and doubt. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The crypto asset class it ushered in has for years been a playground for scammers and ransomware artists, money launderers and hackers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

FTX Collapse<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Bitcoin\u2019s jump to an earlier record above $73,000 in March of this year marked a complete recovery from one of the most dramatic periods in its history: An almost 80% plunge from November 2021 to November 2022. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

That bear market period saw a cascading series of failures \u2014 including the collapse of the FTX exchange, as well as crypto lenders Genesis and Celsius. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The government crackdown that ensued put FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried in prison for 25 years on fraud charges, and landed his rival Changpeng Zhao, founder of the Binance exchange, a four-month sentence for failing to implement proper anti-money laundering controls.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Despite the sordid history of the crypto market, Bitcoin has continued to gain more and more acceptance in the mainstream financial system. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

And the larger the cryptocurrency grows and the more mainstream it gets, the closer the volatile asset gets to becoming systemically important to the global financial system.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Prior to Trump\u2019s election, Bitcoin\u2019s price gains this year were fueled by the popularity of exchange-traded funds that invest directly in the token after they launched in January following a long legal fight between one of the fund\u2019s issuers and the US Securities and Exchange Commission. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Led by Wall Street heavyweights like BlackRock Inc. and Fidelity and the crypto-native Grayscale Investments, the ETFs now hold about $100 billion in assets, or roughly 5% of all the Bitcoin in circulation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2018Supply Squeeze\u2019<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe demand backdrop is solid,\u201d said Manuel Villegas, digital assets analyst at Julius Baer. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIt is not too far-fetched to believe that we might see a renewed chapter of the supply squeeze next year \u2013 the same factor that led us to believe last year that prices could only go one way when demand was growing at a multiple of supply.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Trump\u2019s return to the White House will potentially usher another big whale into the Bitcoin market: The US government itself. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Speaking at a\u00a0Bitcoin conference\u00a0in July, Trump vowed to create a strategic stockpile of the cryptocurrency, starting with assets seized by the US government.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At the same conference, Trump allies Robert Kennedy Jr. and Republican Senator Cynthia Lummis floated the idea of the government buying 1 million Bitcoin \u2014 or $100 billion worth at current prices \u2014 as a way to back the US dollar. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

One Bitcoin is now worth around R1.82 million. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":341034,"featured_media":574442,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[44696],"tags":[187,61488,98032,35045,98111],"class_list":["post-574435","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-cryptocurrency","tag-bitcoin","tag-bitcoin-price","tag-crypto-rally","tag-donald-trump","tag-permabulls"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/574435"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/341034"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=574435"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/574435\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":574445,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/574435\/revisions\/574445"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/574442"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=574435"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=574435"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=574435"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}