12 years back, Bitcoin first came into existence with the genesis block having a reward of 50 BTC. The genesis block came with the text “The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks.”
In 2020, history repeated itself as central banks all over the world went crazy with money printing. This led institutions to see Bitcoin as a hedge against weak dollar and risk of inflation, making it part of their investment portfolio.
On January 3, 2009, the #bitcoin experiment began. The world was changed forever. The separation of money and state became a real possibility for millions, billions. Thank you, Satoshi, Hal Finney, and all of the other earliest bitcoin experimenters.
— Andreas M. Antonopoulos (@aantonop) January 3, 2021
The unprecedented institutional interest in the crypto market had Bitcoin rallying to nearly $35k from the March low of 3,800.
Even at this record high price level, Anthony Scaramucci, the founder of SkyBridge Capital, which today announced its Bitcoin Fund, urged people to invest in it. “You’re still way early to Bitcoin if you’re buying today,” tweeted Scaramucci on Sunday.
Bitcoin is now up about 10,000X since I started making fun of it. You win some you lose some 😀.
— Aaron Levie (@levie) January 2, 2021
“When you look at this bitcoin rally that we have been seeing in the last couple of weeks and months, really, there’s two big elements driving it. One is the continuous entry of institutional players,” PwC’s global crypto leader Henri Arslanian said Monday on CNBC’s “Street Signs Asia.” These institutional players have “an outsized impact on the markets.”
Arslanian who expects this trend to continue over the coming months said, there’s also “a lot of regulated players as well,” which was “not the case a couple of years ago.”
Combined with retail FOMO, “there’s a lot of momentum going on in the space.”
Bitcoin is an exit from the Fed.
DeFi is an exit from Wall Street.
Social media is an exit from mass media.
Homeschooling is an exit from industrial education.
Remote work is an exit from 9-5.
Creator economy is an exit from employment.
Individuals are leaving institutions.
— Naval (@naval) January 3, 2021
As the price continues to go higher and higher, people continue to feel the FOMO as Douglas A. Boneparth, CNBC Advisor Council tweeted, “Instead of drinking coffee and eating avocado toast every day, I should have been buying bitcoin.”
This can especially be seen in the way the market moved in the last few hours.
Bitcoin’s price BTC -3.41% Bitcoin / USD BTCUSD $ 31,558.08
-$1,076.13 -3.41% Volume 82.36 b Change -$1,076.13 Open $31,558.08 Circulating 18.59 m Market Cap 586.69 b
2 h Why Does Bitcoin (BTC) Continue to Tear Up Without Ever Stopping? 3 h Ethereum Blockchain Becomes Absolutely Unusable Yet Again as Average Fees Hits ATH at $20 4 h Anthony Scaramucci’s SkyBridge Capital Launches Institutional-Grade Fund to Directly Invest in Bitcoin; Offers GBTC Swap Too went to $34,825 on Sunday on Coinbase and today we went down to $27,648 and already we are above $31,000.
The same has actually been the case with the second-largest cryptocurrency Ethereum ETH 13.21% Ethereum / USD ETHUSD $ 1,036.04
$136.86 13.21% Volume 59.1 b Change $136.86 Open $1,036.04 Circulating 114.12 m Market Cap 118.23 b
3 h Ethereum Blockchain Becomes Absolutely Unusable Yet Again as Average Fees Hits ATH at $20 4 h Too Afraid to Buy the Dips; Too Much FOMO to Resist Buying The All Time Highs 6 h ETH Rips to Jan 2018 High As The Market Rotates Bitcoin Profits into Ethereum which took just over a day to go from $750 to $1,170 only to fall to $885 to now be back above $1,000.
Even YouTuber Marques Brownlee, best known for his technology-focused videos and his podcast, Waveform: The MKBHD Podcast, took to Twitter to share his interest in buying in Bitcoin and missing out with the price continuing to keep on going higher and higher.
But still, with bitcoin adoption reaching only 2%, a huge population is on the sidelines and institutions have just started coming in.
Just last month, the day BTC broke its previous ATH $20k China’s mainstream financial outlet, Caijing ran a survey on Weibo asking people’s position on Bitcoin which revealed that 11k out of the 20.8k participants responded with “Such a scam, will never buy” while 3.1k said they might buy later.
Do you feel confident buying Bitcoin?
— The Spectator Index (@spectatorindex) January 3, 2021
This only goes on to show that this bull cycle is still in its early phase.