Bitcoin Hits $0.00005 Billion

 Francis Scialabba

Twelve years ago, bitcoin was just an idea. Now, it’s worth as much as a tiny house. Yesterday, the world’s largest cryptocurrency briefly surpassed $50,000 for the first time ever, extending a run that’s mesmerized the business world and frustrated your friend who sold all their bitcoin in 2019.  How we got here A brief timeline of bitcoin’s rise, fall, and even bigger rise. 2008: Satoshi Nakamoto published the bitcoin white paper that laid out the principles of a "new electronic cash system that's fully peer-to-peer, with no trusted third party." To this day, one knows who (or what group of people) Satoshi is. 2010: A programmer bought two pizzas for 10,000 bitcoin in what will go down as the most expensive pizza transaction ever. Let's just assume there were 16 slices between the two pies and you take 15 bites per slice—at today's bitcoin price, that's about $2 million per bite. 2017: JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon called bitcoin a "fraud" (a comment he later walked back). 2018: The NYT ran an article with the headline, "Everyone is getting hilariously rich and you're not" after bitcoin jumped from $830 to $19,300 in the span of one year. Things stopped being quite so hilarious later in 2018, when bitcoin crashed to $3,200.  2020–2021: After hovering below $10,000 for months, bitcoin refueled its rocket ship. It's already up about 75% this year alone. What's next?  Initially conceived as a way of sidestepping traditional financial institutions, bitcoin is now being smothered by them. BNY Mellon, the oldest bank in the US, said it would handle bitcoin for its clients. Mastercard pledged to support cryptos later this year. And a vaunted Morgan Stanley investing unit is reportedly considering placing bets on bitcoin. Plus, Tesla poured $1.5 billion of its cash into bitcoin and said it would accept payment for its products in bitcoin on a limited basis. Bottom line: Bitcoin has been increasingly legitimized by the business community, but it still faces existential questions, including 1) how should it be regulated? 2) what is it actually useful for? and 3) when will Morning Brew put it in its Markets graphic?