A rising tide lifts all boats, as they say, and bitcoin’s latest monster run has propelled all cryptocurrencies to surpass the combined market cap of financial titans Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs.
Bitcoin — the dominant digital currency on the market — zoomed to record highs above $7,300 early on Thursday, growing its market cap to about $120 billion. Added together with other popular cryptos like ethereum and litecoin, the budding industry now has an aggregate market cap (coin price multiplied by the amount in circulation) greater than the $186.2 billion added together between Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs, according to Coinmarketcap.com.
So what spurred bitcoin’s big move? CME Group’s decision to offer bitcoin futures — allowing investors to bet on the price of the cryptocurrency rising or falling by a certain date — on Tuesday sparked its jump from around $6,100 a coin to its current levels above $7,000. The decision from the institution, which dubs itself “the world’s leading and most diverse derivatives marketplace,” gave bitcoin a major vote of confidence and is seen as a step towards its widespread acceptance on Wall Street.
Blowing past the $7,000 threshold was the latest benchmark in bitcoin’s meteoric rise in 2017. The granddaddy cryptocurrency, which was first introduced in early 2009, has rocketed up more than 866 percent in the last year, according to data from exchange site Coinbase.com.
JP Morgan Chase head honcho Jamie Dimon briefly turned out the lights on the party in September, saying bitcoin is “just not a real thing.”
“[Bitcoin’s] worse than tulip bulbs. It won’t end well. Someone is going to get killed,” said Dimon at a Barclays conference. “Currencies have legal support. It will blow up.”
The dig, along with China cracking down on cryptocurrencies, sent bitcoin spiraling down to about $3,000 in mid-September. But rumors of bitcoin’s demise were greatly exaggerated, as the digital currency has already doubled in the two months following Dimon’s comments.
6 Tech Giants Shaking Up News, From Jeff Bezos to Laurene Powell Jobs (Photos)
Tech leaders are increasingly intertwined with the news business. While some want to support old properties, one set out to destroy a new one. Here they are.
Jeff Bezos – Washington Post
The Amazon founder purchased the Washington Post in 2013 for $250 million in cash. President Trump has called the paper the “Amazon Washington Post.”
The Facebook co-founder purchased The New Republic in 2012, becoming executive chairman and publisher. However, he sold the venerable political magazine to Win McCormack in 2016, saying he "underestimated the difficulty of transitioning an old and traditional institution into a digital media company in today’s quickly evolving climate."
The eBay founder is a well-known philanthropist who created First Look Media, a journalism venture behind The Intercept. Inspired by Edward Snowden's leaks. Omidyar teamed up with journalists Glenn Greenwald, Jeremy Scahill and Laura Poitras to launch the website “dedicated to the kind of reporting those disclosures required: fearless, adversarial journalism.”
The PayPal co-founder doesn’t own a news organization, but he makes this list because he essentially ended one -- Gawker -- proving once again the power of an angry billionaire. Thiel secretly bankrolled Hulk Hogan’s sex-tape lawsuit against Gawker Media because he was upset that the website once outed him as gay. Hogan won the defamation lawsuit against the site that sent its parent company into bankruptcy, and Gawker.com is no longer operating.
OK, so Facebook isn’t technically a news organization… yet. However, the company is preparing to launch its much-anticipated lineup of original content later this summer, and there are also signs that it's on the verge of becoming an even bigger media platform.
Campbell Brown, Head of News Partnerships at Facebook, confirmed last week it’s developing a subscription service for publishers willing to post articles directly to Facebook Instant Articles, rather than their native websites.
Tech is increasingly intertwined with news, for better or worse
Tech leaders are increasingly intertwined with the news business. While some want to support old properties, one set out to destroy a new one. Here they are.