Editor’s Morning Note: Wrapping 2016, bitcoin is hitting new aggregate value highs. It’s now worth more than Twitter.
Bitcoin made waves this week by hitting a new aggregate value high, at least according to some measuring tools.
The popular cryptocurrency is not trading for its highest single-unit price of all time. Instead, the combined value of all bitcoin in existence today is at historic highs. The recent rally is likely a boon to investors in bitcoin itself, investors in bitcoin-related companies, and the founders who bet their years on the project.
Bitcoin’s value is near the $14 billion mark this morning, while Twitter is worth a far more modest $11.30 billion ($11.75 billion according to Yahoo), to pick a comparison. Twitter is a useful measuring stick here, as it is a company of intense worth that is hard to value. Bitcoin is similarly hard to price, though it draws interest from a largely different investing pool, I’d imagine.
Quickly, here’s the CoinMarketCap chart that was highlighted on Twitter:
We tend to use Blockchain charts here on Mattermark, but the above will suffice for now.
Why You Should Care
I doubt that the price of bitcoin gets you up in the morning. That’s healthy. But as a technology, the boom and bust cycles we have seen in bitcoin and its related fields are fascinating.
For fun, here are Mattermark’s headlines just from this year concerning bitcoin:
- January 19, 2016: “Relax, The Slowdown In Bitcoin Investment Isn’t As Bad As It Looks.”
- February 4, 2016: “Bitcoin Investment Is Back From The Dead (As Expected).”
- April 5, 2016: “Bitcoin Investment Roars Back To Life In The First Quarter.”
- June 21, 2016: “Bitcoin’s Price Spikes While Venture Dollars Slow And Consumer Adoption Remains Measured.”
- July 15, 2016: “Bitcoin Mining Revenue Falls By More Than Half.”
- August 3, 2016: “Can I Jet My Bitcoin To Wal-Mart In An Uber?”
So it’s been an interesting year. Mostly in that things kept looking awful, but were not as nasty as they seemed. Not completely encouraging, per se, but also nicer than it could have been.
The result is that companies that took to bitcoin and blockchain, and the VCs that funded them are in a better spot than we might have expected. That might save a scalp or point of IRR, but it probably isn’t enough to slow the culling of bitcoin companies.
The rough take from all this is that bitcoin is closing the year on a high note, surviving its (expected) mining changes with grace. So, despite 2016 being a year that most of us want to shove into a memory hole — followed closely by ourselves — at least bitcoin is having a decent concluding run.
