Bitcoin Just Broke $10,000

I remember going to the Consumer Electronics Show years ago and meeting one of my fellow tech bloggers for the first time. He was (and still is) a big proponent of Bitcoin at the time, but that was when it was worth about $100. It peaked about about $1,000 a couple years later, before wildly fluctuating between $300 and $600 or so for several years. That changed this year and now Bitcoin has officially broken the $10,000 threshold for the first time.

According to the currency graph on Coin Market Cap (above), one Bitcoin is now trading at just over $10,000. Using the currency conversion tool built into the Google search engine, on the other hand, it’s showing that one Bitcoin is equal to $9,985.59 US. I’m sure if I conducted the search again in a few minutes, I could get an entirely different figure too.

That’s not just the case with cryptocurrency, of course, as we experience these kinds of moment-to-moment fluctuations with “normal” world currencies. What we don’t see, at least typically, is the same kind of meteoric rise that we’ve experienced with Bitcoin in the past year.

On this day exactly one year ago, a single Bitcoin was worth a little over $700 US. With the cryptocurrency breaking the $10,000 barrier earlier today, that represents more than 1300% growth year-over-year. That still pales in comparison to the crazy inflation rate in Germany following World War I, but it’s easily among one of the fastest changes in a currency in recent memory.

Earlier this year, people figured it was unfathomable for Bitcoin to break $2,500, then it did. Then they thought there was no way it’d break $5,000, then it did. Is it possible for Bitcoin to continue this crazy growth or will it all come crashing down? We can’t know for sure, but the underlying blockchain technology could very well be a big part of the future. It’s not just about cryptocurrency.

If you’re as lost as I am, watch this recent video put up by Wired that explains what the blockchain is and why focusing only on these crypto coins really limits our scope on how this all works.

[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hYip_Vuv8J0]