Bitcoin Rallies Above $100K, Marking Gains Of 333.4 Million Times Since 2010

BTC pushed above $100,000 for the first time late Wednesday night, tagging an all-time high of nearly $103,700, according to CoinGecko. Bitcoin has since retraced by 0.5%, last changing hands for $102,960 at an almost $2.04 trillion market cap.

Bitcoin now ranks as the seventh-largest asset in the world above Saudi Aramco with $1.79 trillion and just shy of Alphabet (Google) with $2.14 trillion. The momentum has pushed the value of a single Satoshi — the smallest divisible unit of a Bitcoin — above $0.001.

With Bitcoin first priced at roughly $0.003 on May 22, 2010, when Laszlo Hanyecz, a software developer and early Bitcoin adopter, purchased two pizzas for 10,000 BTC, the price of Bitcoin has risen more than 333.4 million times to date.

Powell likens Bitcoin to digital gold

Bitcoin’s latest rally followed Jerome Powell, the chair of the U.S. Federal Reserve, showing support for the thesis that BTC comprises a digital analog to gold during the New York Times DealBook Summit in New York on Dec. 2.

“It’s just like gold, only it’s virtual, it’s digital,” Powell said. “People are not using it as a form of payment or as a store of value. It’s highly volatile.”

Powell also dismissed the notion that BTC could comprise a competitor to the U.S. dollar. “It’s not a competitor for the dollar,” Powell said. “It’s really a competitor for gold.”

When asked about increasing efforts from Republican lawmakers to stockpile BTC as part of a national strategic Bitcoin reserve, Powell emphasized the Federal Reserve’s objective of keeping the U.S. banking system “safe and sound,” asserting that moves to embrace digital assets should not undermine the stability of the traditional financial system.

Cobra says Bitcoin fork looms

On Nov. 30, Cobra, the owner of the bitcoin.org domain and longtime Bitcoin community member, warned that a cohort of the Bitcoin community is planning on launching a user-activated soft fork in 2025.

The fork would seek to introduce the Check Template Verify (CTV) upgrades outlined in Bitcoin Improvement Proposal (BIP) 119, which would allow users to program transaction conditions for BTC held in a designated wallet.

For example, CTV would allow users to enforce that BTC can only be sent to a single predetermined wallet address, or specify a timeframe in which pending transactions can be cancelled.

However, supporters of Bitcoin Core have opposed the implementation of CTV, warning against adding increasing complexity and thus potential vulnerabilities to the Bitcoin codebase.