The price of bitcoin crossed the $10,000 threshold late Tuesday, a major milestone for the skyrocketing cryptocurrency that has shot up more than 20% in the past week alone.
Bitcoin BTCUSD, +6.97% was most recently at $10,319 on Tuesday night, according to CoinDesk.com. The cryptocurrency topped $9,000 for the first time Sunday, and has now cracked four $1,000 milestones this month.
Bitcoin is up more than 934% year to date, with a current market cap of $176.3 billion, according to CoinMarketCap.com — more than all but a handful of S&P 500 companies.
Arthur Hayes, co-founder and chief executive of cryptocurrency exchange BitMex, stressed the importance of the $10,000 earlier this month.
“The only two levels that matter are $10,000 and $5,000,” Hayes said, according to Forbes. “The rest is just noise.”
The meteoric rise hasn’t silenced bitcoin’s detractors — quite the opposite, with many warning that it’s in a classic bubble.
“Avoid bitcoin like the plague. Did I make myself clear?” Vanguard founder and investing icon Jack Bogle said Tuesday during a Q&A.
On Monday, after bitcoin passed $9,000, Josh Brown, CEO of Ritholtz Wealth Management and author of the Reformed Broker blog, said bitcoin is “now officially an investor mania.”
“Like all manias, when it turns people are going to be wiped out,” he wrote in a blog post.
Others, though, believe this is only the beginning.
Former hedge-fund manager Michael Novogratz — who predicted in October that bitcoin would hit $10,000 by year’s end — said Monday he could “easily” see bitcoin at $40,000 by the end of 2018, even as he admitted cryptocurrencies are “a speculator’s dream.”
He’s not alone. Michael Arrington, the Silicon Valley venture capitalist and founder of TechCrunch, on Tuesday announced he was launching a $100 million cybercurrency hedge fund, saying he’s devoting the rest of his career to the nascent, and volatile, industry.
“There will be dramatic ups and downs along the way,” Arrington wrote in a blog post, “but we’re in this for the long haul.”