Sorry, Pepsi. It looks like bitcoin is the taste of a new generation.
The granddaddy cryptocurrency continues to reach new all-time highs seemingly on an hourly basis, pushing past $11,000 on Wednesday morning — shortly after passing the $10,000 threshold on Tuesday.
Bitcoin’s latest blitz has sent its market cap north of $186 billion, according to Coin Market Cap — lapping the 124-year-old soda by about $20 billion. Coca-Cola isn’t safe, either, with its $10 billion advantage on bitcoin on shaky ground.
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And it’s not just soda mainstays that bitcoin is blowing past. Disney — you know, home of Mickey Mouse, Buzz Lightyear and “Star Wars” — now takes a backseat to bitcoin. Same for General Electric. And Comcast. And McDonalds.
Those companies all have many millions of customers more than bitcoin has investors right now, of course. But the cryptocurrency’s run in 2017 — and in the last month in particular — has spurred a severe case of investor “FOMO.” After starting the year around $1,000, bitcoin has shot up as both Wall Street and novice investors have taken notice of its decentralized ledger — allowing users anywhere in the world to see the latest bitcoin transactions.
Its dependence on the blockchain technology — the underlying ledger that records all transactions — rather than a centralized government, has been especially attractive to citizens in Venezuela, Zimbabwe, and other countries in peril. At the same time, a planned “fork” — an offshoot in Bitcoin’s ledger that would’ve created an alternative version of the cryptocurrency — was called off earlier this month, reinforcing investor confidence.
Coupled with kids telling their parents about it over Thanksgiving, and a wave of buying from Asian markets, bitcoin has surged more than 30 percent in the last week.
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