Simple Bitcoin Converter
Exchange rate calculated using USD Bitcoin price.
This site allows you to:
- See the Bitcoin exchange rate i.e. the current value of one bitcoin.
- Convert any amount to or from your preferred currency.
Bitcoin is a digital currency. You can use Bitcoin to send money to anyone via the Internet with no middleman. Learn more here.
Keep an eye on the Bitcoin price, even while browsing in other tabs. Simply keep this site open and see the live Bitcoin price in the browser tab. (Note: Some mobile browsers don’t yet support this feature.)
See how many bitcoins you can buy. Enter an amount on the right-hand input field, to see the equivalent amount in Bitcoin on the left.
See the value of your Bitcoin holdings. Enter the number of bitcoins you have, and watch their value fluctuate over time.
Compare Bitcoin to gold and other precious metals by checking out the converters for Bitcoin to gold, Bitcoin to silver, Bitcoin to platinum, and Bitcoin to palladium.
Try it on your phone or tablet—this site is designed with mobile devices in mind.
Convert in terms of smaller units e.g. microbitcoins (µ), millibitcoins (m). Toggle using keyboard shortcuts: 'u', 'm', and 'k'.
Bookmark your preferred currency e.g. Bitcoin to Euro, or Bitcoin to British Pound. This site currently supports 64 currencies.
Price data is continually gathered from multiple markets. A weighted average price of these markets is shown by default (based on 24-hour trade volume). Alternatively, you can choose a specific source from the settings menu.
Development
- Linkable (i.e. bookmarkable, shareable) amounts.
- A widget to be embedded on other sites.
- Options added for millibitcoins, and 3 new cryptocurrencies. 2014-03-16
- Volume-weighted pricing implemented as the default option. 2013-11-29
- Multiple data source options included. Currency chooser improved. 08-16
- Major Android-related bugs fixed. (Thanks to those who donated!) 07-07
You’re welcome to contact the creator of this site at Reddit or BitcoinTalk. Bug reports are greatly appreciated.
Disclaimer
The exchange rates on this site are for information purposes only. They are not guaranteed to be accurate, and are subject to change without notice.
Bitcoin value
The Bitcoin.com Composite Price Index
Unlike stocks, bitcoin markets never close. Bitcoin is traded 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and 365 days a year in dozens of currency pairs at exchanges all over the world. Across the globe, people create buy and sell orders based on their individual valuations of bitcoin, leading to global, real-time price discovery.
While Bitcoin's price history is not without major bubbles, volatilty overall has been trending downward.
Buy and sell digital currency
Coinbase is the easiest and most trusted place to buy, sell, and manage your digital currency.
Create your digital currency portfolio today
Coinbase has a variety of features that make it the best place to start trading
Manage your portfolio
Buy and sell popular digital currencies, keep track of them in the one place.
Recurring buys
Invest in digital currency slowly over time by scheduling buys daily, weekly, or monthly.
Vault protection
For added security, store your funds in a vault with time delayed withdrawals.
Mobile apps
Stay on top of the markets with the Coinbase app for Android or iOS.
The most trusted digital currency platform
Here are a few reasons why you should choose Coinbase
Secure storage
We store the vast majority of the digital assets held on Coinbase in secure offline storage.
Protected by insurance
Digital currency stored on our servers is covered by our insurance policy.
Industry best practices
We take security seriously, and have built a reputation of being the most trusted in the space.
Bitcoin just soared to a new $1,600 high — but the first investor in Snapchat thinks it could hit $500,000 by 2030
Jeremy Liew. Getty Bitcoin has been the top-performing currency in the world in six of the past seven years, climbing from zero to a new high value of about $1,600.
But the cryptocurrency isn't anywhere close to its potential, according to Jeremy Liew, the first investor in Snapchat, and Peter Smith, the CEO and cofounder of Blockchain.
In a presentation sent to Business Insider, the duo laid out their case for bitcoin exploding to $500,000 by 2030.
Their argument is based on increased interest in bitcoin, thanks to:
Bitcoin-based remittances
Remittance transfers, or electronic money transfers to foreign countries, have almost doubled over the past 15 years to 0.76% of gross world product, data from the World Bank shows.
"Expats sending money home have found in bitcoin an inexpensive alternative, and we assume that the percentage of bitcoin-based remittances will sharply increase with greater bitcoin awareness," the two said.
Uncertainty
Liew and Smith said increased political uncertainty in the UK, US, and developing nations would help elevate the level of interest in bitcoin.
"We believe bitcoin awareness, high liquidity, ease of transport, and continued market outperformance as geopolitical risks mount will make bitcoin a strong contender for investment at a consumer and investor level," the two said.
Mobile penetration
Liew and Smith said the percentage of noncash transactions would climb from 15% to 30% in the next 10 years as the world becomes more connected through smartphones.
The global smartphone penetration rate is 63%, and the total number of smartphone users is expected to increase by 1 billion by 2020. The GSMA, a trade body that represents the interests of mobile operators worldwide, says 90% of these users will come from developing countries.
This would make it possible for nearly everyone to have a bank in their pocket, and that should provide a boost for bitcoin as well. Liew and Smith say bitcoin could account for 50% of all noncash transactions.
Here are the basic model drivers Liew and Smith used:
- A bitcoin price of $1,000 in 2017.
- Network users will grow by a factor of 61 from now until 2030. "Put another way, we need a population of bitcoin users around a quarter of the Chinese population (or 5% of the global population) in 2030 to see bitcoin at $500k," Liew and Smith told Business Insider. Bitcoin's user network grew from 120,000 users in 2013 to 6.5 million users in 2017, or by a factor of about 54, and this could be just the beginning. Growth of that magnitude would mean 400 million users in 2030.
- The average value of bitcoin held per user will hit $25,000. "As institutional investor cash in bitcoin, sophisticated investors trading bitcoin, and bitcoin-based ETFs proliferate, we think the average bitcoin value held will increase to around $25k per Bitcoin holder," Liew and Smith said. Currently, with bitcoin's market cap of $16.4 billion, each of its 6.5 million users holds $2,515 worth of bitcoin on average.
- Bitcoin's 2030 market cap is decided by the number of bitcoin holders multiplied by the average bitcoin value held.
- Bitcoin's 2030 supply will be about 20 million.
- Bitcoin's 2030 price and user count will total $500,000 and 400 million, respectively. The price was found by taking the $10 trillion market cap and dividing it by the fixed supply of 20 million bitcoin.
But a lot could go wrong, too. News surrounding bitcoin has been rather negative as of late.
China, which is responsible for nearly 100% of trading in bitcoin, has been cracking down on trading. The three biggest exchanges recently announced a 0.2% fee on all transactions and blocked withdrawals from trading accounts.
The US Securities and Exchange Commission also rejected two bitcoin exchange-traded funds and will rule on another one in the future. It's not expected to be approved.
However, Smith says bitcoin is still in its early stages.
"The SEC's ruling wasn't a surprise to us," he told Business Insider. He said that "getting that sort of approval" could take a long time.
"In the meantime, bitcoin is already simple to buy and hold, and as the asset continues to mature, we'll continue to see an increase in the development and deployment of surrounding products," he said.
And while bitcoin hasn't been granted regulatory approval in the US, it is catching on elsewhere. On April 1, the cryptocurrency became a legal payment method in Japan.
Another threat to its future is developers who are threatening to set up a "hard fork," or alternative marketplace for bitcoin. This would result in the split of into bitcoin and bitcoin unlimited. However, Smith isn't worried.
"Bitcoin has strong economic incentives to prevent this," he said. "If the last two years of healthy contention and debate lead to a conclusion, it's that bitcoin is incredibly resilient and stable. In fact, the bitcoin blockchain has operated for seven-plus years with no downtime, a feat no other back-end system operating at this scale can claim."
But the cryptocurrency sees violent price swings uncommon among the more traditional currencies. Bitcoin rallied 20% in the first week of 2017 before crashing 35% on word that China was cracking down on trading.
The cryptocurrency has regained those losses and is trading up about 67% so far this year.
Ethereum (ETH) Price
Pricing News
German Authorities Sold $14 Million in Seized Cryptos Over Price Fears
May 29, 2018 at 10:00 | Wolfie Zhao
Prosecutors in Germany have made an emergency sale of cryptocurrencies seized in two investigations due to concerns over price volatility.
Bitcoin Price Faces Last Major Support Level Before $5K
May 29, 2018 at 09:00 | Omkar Godbole
Bitcoin is down again and looks set to test another key support level at $6,900, the technical charts indicate.
Bitcoin Bears In Charge But Indecision Could Spur Rally
May 28, 2018 at 10:25 | Omkar Godbole
While the odds are still stacked in favor of bitcoin's bears, marketplace exhaustion may have provided a chance for a brief rally.
IHS Markit Has A Plan to Tokenize A $1 Trillion Loan Market
May 28, 2018 at 04:00 | Ian Allison
IHS Markit is developing a blockchain-based system to handle cash payments in syndicated loans – and eventually, in a wider range of transactions.
Just One Top Crypto Bucked This Week's Market Downturn
May 25, 2018 at 15:15 | Omkar Godbole
Shadowing the losses in bitcoin, the top-25 cryptocurrencies have all fallen over the last seven days – all bar one, that is.
Bitcoin Faces Close Below Long-Term Support In First Since 2015
May 25, 2018 at 10:00 | Omkar Godbole
If bitcoin closes the week below the 50-week moving average it will increase the likelihood of a sell-off to $6,000
Revolut App Adds XRP, Bitcoin Cash to Crypto Options
May 24, 2018 at 14:35 | Daniel Palmer
Mobile banking app Revolut now lets users buy, sell and hold Ripple's XRP and bitcoin cash, in addition to bitcoin, litecoin and ether.
Bitcoin Faces Drop to $7K as Bull Defense Crumbles
May 24, 2018 at 09:30 | Omkar Godbole
Bitcoin looks set to test $7,000 in the next 24 hours, courtesy of a bear flag breakdown on the technical charts.
Coinbase Is Rebranding Its Crypto Exchange Service
May 23, 2018 at 20:26 | Nikhilesh De
Coinbase announced Wednesday it was rebranding its GDAX platform as Coinbase Pro. Additionally, the company has acquired Paradex, a relay platform.
Bitcoin Price Faces Bear Indicator Not Seen Since 2014
May 23, 2018 at 09:00 | Omkar Godbole
Following bitcoin's recent losses, a key long-term trend indicator is looking increasingly bearish.
Bitcoin (USD) Price
Pricing News
German Authorities Sold $14 Million in Seized Cryptos Over Price Fears
May 29, 2018 at 10:00 | Wolfie Zhao
Prosecutors in Germany have made an emergency sale of cryptocurrencies seized in two investigations due to concerns over price volatility.
Bitcoin Price Faces Last Major Support Level Before $5K
May 29, 2018 at 09:00 | Omkar Godbole
Bitcoin is down again and looks set to test another key support level at $6,900, the technical charts indicate.
Bitcoin Bears In Charge But Indecision Could Spur Rally
May 28, 2018 at 10:25 | Omkar Godbole
While the odds are still stacked in favor of bitcoin's bears, marketplace exhaustion may have provided a chance for a brief rally.
IHS Markit Has A Plan to Tokenize A $1 Trillion Loan Market
May 28, 2018 at 04:00 | Ian Allison
IHS Markit is developing a blockchain-based system to handle cash payments in syndicated loans – and eventually, in a wider range of transactions.
Just One Top Crypto Bucked This Week's Market Downturn
May 25, 2018 at 15:15 | Omkar Godbole
Shadowing the losses in bitcoin, the top-25 cryptocurrencies have all fallen over the last seven days – all bar one, that is.
Bitcoin Faces Close Below Long-Term Support In First Since 2015
May 25, 2018 at 10:00 | Omkar Godbole
If bitcoin closes the week below the 50-week moving average it will increase the likelihood of a sell-off to $6,000
Revolut App Adds XRP, Bitcoin Cash to Crypto Options
May 24, 2018 at 14:35 | Daniel Palmer
Mobile banking app Revolut now lets users buy, sell and hold Ripple's XRP and bitcoin cash, in addition to bitcoin, litecoin and ether.
Bitcoin Faces Drop to $7K as Bull Defense Crumbles
May 24, 2018 at 09:30 | Omkar Godbole
Bitcoin looks set to test $7,000 in the next 24 hours, courtesy of a bear flag breakdown on the technical charts.
Coinbase Is Rebranding Its Crypto Exchange Service
May 23, 2018 at 20:26 | Nikhilesh De
Coinbase announced Wednesday it was rebranding its GDAX platform as Coinbase Pro. Additionally, the company has acquired Paradex, a relay platform.
Bitcoin Price Faces Bear Indicator Not Seen Since 2014
May 23, 2018 at 09:00 | Omkar Godbole
Following bitcoin's recent losses, a key long-term trend indicator is looking increasingly bearish.
US Search Mobile Web
Welcome to the Yahoo Search forum! We’d love to hear your ideas on how to improve Yahoo Search.
The Yahoo product feedback forum now requires a valid Yahoo ID and password to participate.
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Your search engine does not find any satisfactory results for searches. It is too weak. Also, the server of bing is often off
I created a yahoo/email account long ago but I lost access to it; can y'all delete all my yahoo/yahoo account except for my newest YaAccount
I want all my lost access yahoo account 'delete'; Requesting supporter for these old account deletion; 'except' my Newest yahoo account this Account don't delete! Because I don't want it interfering my online 'gamble' /games/business/data/ Activity , because the computer/security program might 'scure' my Information and detect theres other account; then secure online activities/ business securing from my suspicion because of my other account existing will make the security program be 'Suspicious' until I'm 'secure'; and if I'm gambling online 'Depositing' then I need those account 'delete' because the insecurity 'Suspicioun' will program the casino game 'Programs' securities' to be 'secure' then it'll be 'unfair' gaming and I'll lose because of the insecurity can be a 'Excuse'. Hope y'all understand my explanation!
I want all my lost access yahoo account 'delete'; Requesting supporter for these old account deletion; 'except' my Newest yahoo account this Account don't delete! Because I don't want it interfering my online 'gamble' /games/business/data/ Activity , because the computer/security program might 'scure' my Information and detect theres other account; then secure online activities/ business securing from my suspicion because of my other account existing will make the security program be 'Suspicious' until I'm 'secure'; and if I'm gambling online 'Depositing' then I need those account 'delete' because the insecurity 'Suspicioun' will program the casino game 'Programs' securities' to be… more
chithidio@Yahoo.com
i dont know what happened but i can not search anything.
Golf handicap tracker, why can't I get to it?
Why do I get redirected on pc and mobile device?
Rahyaftco@yahoo.com
RYAN RAHSAD BELL literally means
Question on a link
In the search for Anaïs Nin, one of the first few links shows a picture of a man. Why? Since Nin is a woman, I can’t figure out why. Can you show some reason for this? Who is he? If you click on the picture a group of pictures of Nin and no mention of that man. Is it an error?
Repair the Yahoo Search App.
Yahoo Search App from the Google Play Store on my Samsung Galaxy S8+ phone stopped working on May 18, 2018.
I went to the Yahoo Troubleshooting page but the article that said to do a certain 8 steps to fix the problem with Yahoo Services not working and how to fix the problem. Of course they didn't work.
I contacted Samsung thru their Samsung Tutor app on my phone. I gave their Technican access to my phone to see if there was a problem with my phone that stopped the Yahoo Search App from working. He went to Yahoo and I signed in so he could try to fix the Yahoo Search App not working. He also used another phone, installed the app from the Google Play Store to see if the app would do any kind of search thru the app. The Yahoo Search App just wasn't working.
I also had At&t try to help me because I have UVERSE for my internet service. My internet was working perfectly. Their Technical Support team member checked the Yahoo Search App and it wouldn't work for him either.
We can go to www.yahoo.com and search for any topic or website. It's just the Yahoo Search App that won't allow anyone to do web searches at all.
I let Google know that the Yahoo Search App installed from their Google Play Store had completely stopped working on May 18, 2018.
I told them that Yahoo has made sure that their Yahoo members can't contact them about anything.
I noticed that right after I accepted the agreement that said Oath had joined with Verizon I started having the problem with the Yahoo Search App.
No matter what I search for or website thru the Yahoo Search App it says the following after I searched for
www.att.com.
WEBPAGE NOT AVAILABLE
This webpage at gttp://r.search.yahoo.com/_ylt=A0geJGq8BbkrgALEMMITE5jylu=X3oDMTEzcTjdWsyBGNvbG8DYmyxBHBvcwMxBHZ0aWQDTkFQUEMwxzEEc2VjA3NylRo=10/Ru=https%3a%2f%2fwww.att.att.com%2f/Rk=2/Es=plkGNRAB61_XKqFjTEN7J8cXA-
could not be loaded because:
net::ERR_CLEARTEXT_NOT_PERMITTED
I tried to search for things like www.homedepot.com. The same thing happened. It would say WEBPAGE NOT AVAILABLE. The only thing that changed were all the upper and lower case letters, numbers and symbols.
Then it would again say
could not be loaded because:
net::ERR_CLEARTEXT_NOT_PERMITTED
This is the same thing that happened when Samsung and At&t tried to do any kind of searches thru the Yahoo Search App.
Yahoo needs to fix the problem with their app.
Yahoo Search App from the Google Play Store on my Samsung Galaxy S8+ phone stopped working on May 18, 2018.
I went to the Yahoo Troubleshooting page but the article that said to do a certain 8 steps to fix the problem with Yahoo Services not working and how to fix the problem. Of course they didn't work.
I contacted Samsung thru their Samsung Tutor app on my phone. I gave their Technican access to my phone to see if there was a problem with my phone that stopped the Yahoo Search App from working. He went to Yahoo and… more
Bitcoin Price (BTC - USD)
GO IN-DEPTH ON BITCOIN PRICE
Crypto is making a comeback as Italy's political crisis mounts
Crypto markets are making a big comeback as political uncertainty grips Italy and Europe. .
NEWS FOR BITCOIN PRICEMore
INFO ON Bitcoin
BITCOIN HISTORICAL PRICES
BITCOIN CURRENCY CONVERTER More
About Bitcoin Price
What is Bitcoin? By Markets Insider
Bitcoin keeps coming back in the headlines. With any Bitcoin price change making news and keeping investors guessing.
In countries that accept it, you can buy groceries and clothes just as you would with the local currency. Only bitcoin is entirely digital; no one is carrying actual bitcoins around in their pocket.
Bitcoin is divorced from governments and central banks. It's organized through a network known as a blockchain, which is basically an online ledger that keeps a secure record of each transaction and bitcoin price all in one place. Every time anyone buys or sells bitcoin, the swap gets logged. Several hundred of these back-and-forths make up a block.
No one controls these blocks, because blockchains are decentralized across every computer that has a bitcoin wallet, which you only get if you buy bitcoins.
Why bother using it?
True to its origins as an open, decentralized currency, bitcoin is meant to be a quicker, cheaper, and more reliable form of payment than money tied to individual countries. In addition, it's the only form of money users can theoretically "mine" themselves, if they (and their computers) have the ability.
But even for those who don't discover using their own high-powered computers, anyone can buy and sell bitcoins at the bitcoin price they want, typically through online exchanges like Coinbase or LocalBitcoins.
A 2015 survey showed bitcoin users tend to be overwhelmingly white and male, but of varying incomes. The people with the most bitcoins are more likely to be using it for illegal purposes, the survey suggested.
Each bitcoin has a complicated ID, known as a hexadecimal code, that is many times more difficult to steal than someone's credit-card information. And since there is a finite number to be accounted for, there is less of a chance bitcoin or fractions of a bitcoin will go missing.
But while fraudulent credit-card purchases are reversible, bitcoin transactions are not.
Bitcoin is unique in that there are a finite number of them: 21 million. Satoshi Nakamoto, bitcoin's enigmatic founder, arrived at that number by assuming people would discover, or "mine," a set number of blocks of transactions daily.
Every four years, the number of bitcoins released relative to the previous cycle gets cut in half, as does the reward to miners for discovering new blocks. (The reward right now is 12.5 bitcoins.) As a result, the number of bitcoins in circulation will approach 21 million, but never hit it.
This means bitcoin never experiences inflation. Unlike US dollars, whose buying power the Fed can dilute by printing more greenbacks, there simply won't be more bitcoin available in the future. That has worried some skeptics, as it means a hack could be catastrophic in wiping out people's bitcoin wallets, with less hope for reimbursement. Which could render bitcoin price irrelevant.
The future of bitcoin
Historically, the currency has been extremely volatile. But go by its recent boom — and a forecast by Snapchat's first investor, Jeremy Liew, that it will hit a bitcoin price of $500,000 by 2030 — and nabbing even a fraction of a bitcoin starts to look a lot more enticing.
Bitcoin users predict 94% of all bitcoins will have been released by 2024. As the total number creeps toward the 21 million mark, many suspect the profits miners once made creating new blocks will become so low they'll become negligible. With bitcoin’s price dropping significantly. But with more bitcoins in circulation, people also expect transaction fees to rise, possibly making up the difference.
One of the biggest moments for Bitcoin came in August 2017. When the digital currency officially forked and split in two: bitcoin cash and bitcoin.
Miners were able to seek out bitcoin cash beginning Tuesday August 1st 2017, and the cryptocurrency-focused news website CoinDesk said the first bitcoin cash was mined at about 2:20 p.m. ET.
Supporters of the newly formed bitcoin cash believe the currency will "breath new life into" the nearly 10-year-old bitcoin by addressing some of the issues facing bitcoin of late, such as slow transaction speeds.
Bitcoin power brokers have been squabbling over the rules that should guide the cryptocurrency's blockchain network.
On one side are the so-called core developers. They are in favor of smaller bitcoin blocks, which they say are less vulnerable to hacking. On the other side are the miners, who want to increase the size of blocks to make the network faster and more scalable.
Until just before the decision, the solution known as Segwit2x, which would double the size of bitcoin blocks to 2 megabytes, seemed to have universal support.
Then bitcoin cash came along. The solution is a fork of the bitcoin system. The new software has all the history of the old platform; however, bitcoin cash blocks have a capacity 8 megabytes.
Bitcoin cash came out of left field, according to Charles Morris, a chief investment officer of NextBlock Global, an investment firm with digital assets.
"A group of miners who didn't like SegWit2x are opting for this new software that will increase the size of blocks from the current 1 megabyte to 8," Morris told Business Insider.
To be sure, only a minority of bitcoin miners and bitcoin exchanges have said they will support the new currency.
Investors who have their bitcoin on exchanges or wallets that support the new currency will soon see their holdings double, with one unit in bitcoin cash added for every bitcoin. But that doesn't mean the value of investors' holdings will double.
Because bitcoin cash initially drew its value from bitcoin's market cap, it caused bitcoin's value to drop by an amount proportional to its adoption on launch.
The future of bitcoin and bitcoin’s price remains uncertain. It could go to a $1,000,000 or it could go to $0. No one truly knows.
Buy and sell digital currency
Coinbase is the easiest and most trusted place to buy, sell, and manage your digital currency.
Create your digital currency portfolio today
Coinbase has a variety of features that make it the best place to start trading
Manage your portfolio
Buy and sell popular digital currencies, keep track of them in the one place.
Recurring buys
Invest in digital currency slowly over time by scheduling buys daily, weekly, or monthly.
Vault protection
For added security, store your funds in a vault with time delayed withdrawals.
Mobile apps
Stay on top of the markets with the Coinbase app for Android or iOS.
The most trusted digital currency platform
Here are a few reasons why you should choose Coinbase
Secure storage
We store the vast majority of the digital assets held on Coinbase in secure offline storage.
Protected by insurance
Digital currency stored on our servers is covered by our insurance policy.
Industry best practices
We take security seriously, and have built a reputation of being the most trusted in the space.
How High Can Bitcoin's Price Go in 2018?
Had Jerry Brito’s daughter waited longer to emerge, she might have been someone else entirely. In November, as Brito paced the hospital for 23 hours while his wife was in the delivery room, he floated an alternative name for the baby: “Ten Thousand.”
The founding executive director of the nonprofit Coin Center, Brito had spent years advocating for Bitcoin, arguing that the cryptocurrency, and the technology underpinning it, would dramatically change our economy, reshaping the world into which we’re all born. Now Brito was on the cusp of realizing two long-held dreams. Even as his wife went into labor a few days after Thanksgiving, Bitcoin was taking off as well. Worth $950 at the start of the year, its price breached $9,000 while Brito waited in the maternity ward. This explained why his daughter was taking her time, he began saying: “This baby does not want to be born in a world where Bitcoin is not $10,000.”
Alas, the price was only $9,600 when Brito’s daughter arrived early Nov. 27; the parents went with a different name. But Bitcoin broke $10,000 the following night. And in the newborn’s first 10 days on earth, it more than doubled again, grazing $20,000. In all, Bitcoin has seen a roughly 20-fold rise since the beginning of 2017, outshining virtually every conventional investment.
For true believers, the soaring rise rewarded a deep-seated faith. “It’s always been kind of obvious to me that this technology is as profoundly revolutionary as the Internet was and is,” Brito says. But Bitcoin’s spike also represented the revolution’s next phase. Less prescient investors, fearing they’d miss the opportunity of a lifetime, had jumped into the currency, spurring a frenzy. “If Bitcoin is successful, the opportunity I have, my son will not have, and definitively, my son’s son will not have,” says Martin Garcia, managing director at Genesis Trading, the only licensed U.S. broker-dealer for Bitcoin. “Once it’s successful, it’s a boring investment—it’s a way to move money around the world.” And “boring” doesn’t earn you 1,800% in a year.
Going Mainstream
Bitcoin has provoked hysteria before. Over one stretch of 2013, its price surged 85-fold; it crashed the following year after a hack of the exchange Mt. Gox shook the confidence of many early devotees. It wasn’t until 2017, though, that Bitcoin hit a tipping point of mainstream popularity. By November, one of the biggest U.S. Bitcoin exchanges, Coinbase, had signed up some 12 million customers, surpassing the number of accounts at 46-year-old brokerage Charles Schwab (schw). Within weeks, Coinbase’s app became the iPhone’s most downloaded. At press time, Bitcoin, once largely an insurgent’s fantasy, was worth some $300 billion in real money.
“We are going through the biggest wealth generation opportunity of the century, and people want to participate,” says Meltem Demirors, director of development at Digital Currency Group. DCG oversees a cryptocurrency portfolio including 1% of the total Bitcoin supply. It also invests in startups working on blockchains, accounting tools that use networks of computers to collectively sustain mutually trusted, shared ledgers of transactions, without relying on any outside institutions as middlemen.
The appeal of this tech is stoked by geopolitical unease. Since its inception in 2009, Bitcoin has fed off the festering distrust in institutions sown by the financial crisis. And as populist sentiment has spread in the West, so has the allure of a decentralized currency outside the grasp of governments and banks. Bitcoin’s price jumped after the U.K.’s Brexit vote in 2016—and again when Donald Trump won the White House. Combine such surges with ransomware attacks demanding payment in Bitcoin and buyers from countries like Venezuela seeking refuge from hyperinflation, and Bitcoin’s significance has penetrated the public consciousness like never before.
“You do have people turning to it as that disaster hedge, much as they turn to gold,” says Chris Burniske, cofounder of VC firm Placeholder and coauthor of Cryptoassets, a new investor’s guide. “There’s so much ammunition” feeding this movement, agrees Mike Novogratz, a billionaire former hedge fund manager who now has 30% of his net worth invested in Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. Every establishment failure reinforces the thesis; after debacles like the Wells Fargo fake-account scandal, he asks, “I’m supposed to trust those f–king banks?”
Trust them or not, banks and asset managers are poised to flock to Bitcoin too. “Wall Street has just started to dip their toes in,” says Tyler Winklevoss, CEO and cofounder of Gemini, whose cryptocurrency exchange partnered with a more traditional one, CBOE, on Bitcoin futures contracts in December, offering institutional giants a way to participate. “It’s the bottom of the first inning.”
Skeptics see a familiar mix of new-paradigm euphoria and get-rich-quick mania, with an unhappy ending looming. “It seems like the dotcom bubble all over again, or the housing bubble all over again,” cautions Robert Shiller, the Nobel Prize–winning economist who literally wrote the book on the subject. (Shiller, who foresaw those crashes, tells Fortune he’s contemplating a fourth edition of his Irrational Exuberance, updated to include the cryptocurrency craze.)
Still, for now the stampede of optimists continues, economists and possible calamity be damned. As investors pile in from Main Street to Wall Street, the question becomes, Is Bitcoin’s rise more than an ephemeral rush?
Why Bitcoin Soared
In August 2010, nearly two years after conceiving of Bitcoin in a landmark white paper, Satoshi Nakamoto, the project’s pseudonymous, as yet unidentified creator (or creators), proposed a thought experiment. “Imagine there was a base metal as scarce as gold,” the inventor wrote in a thread on an online Bitcoin forum. The imaginary metal would not be “useful for any practical or ornamental purpose,” Nakamoto wrote, but would have “one special, magical property: [It] can be transported over a communications channel.”
Nakamoto was describing a physical analog to Bitcoin, and his point was to address a fundamental paradox of money: How does money get valued as a medium of exchange when its value lies solely in being a medium of exchange? The simple answer: It’s mostly subjective. Perhaps limited supply and instantaneous portability would be enough to justify a market value for Nakamoto’s magic substance. Maybe speculators, “foreseeing its potential usefulness for exchange,” would bet on the stuff. “I would definitely want some,” the philosopher teased.
Investors, it turns out, wanted some too—even though Bitcoin’s usefulness remains largely theoretical. While some advocates dream of Bitcoin becoming the first universal currency, supplanting central banks and replacing Visa and Mastercard, so far its computerized bits are, at best, equivalent to “digital gold.” They’re good as a place to park money—what economists call a “store of value”—but impractical for payments, says Matt Huang, a partner at VC firm Sequoia. “The popular narrative around using Bitcoin to buy coffee or pizza is a pipe dream at this point.”
Fred Ehrsam, ex-president of Coinbase, notes how unusual this “magical Internet money” is in practice. “The thing that gives it value is other people giving it value, which is a strange thing to wrap one’s mind around.” Strange, but hardly unprecedented: Like the green paper our economy is built on—and the gold and silver that predate it—Bitcoin is valuable because we collectively decide it is. “And if enough people agree,” adds Huang, “then the bubble can just persist.”
To justify Bitcoin’s tremendous rise, bulls like the Winklevoss twins point to Metcalfe’s Law, which states that a network’s value increases exponentially with each additional participant. Tyler, along with his brother Cameron, entered the national spotlight after suing Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, their Harvard schoolmate, for allegedly stealing their business plan. In Bitcoin they’ve found a lucrative second act. Having invested a portion of their $65 million Facebook settlement in the cryptocurrency some years ago, the twins are said to have recently become billionaires. “Money is in many ways the ultimate social network,” Tyler says. “It’s a medium of value that connects us all.”
Bitcoin also enjoys the brand recognition shared by innovators that arrive early and dominate fast, like Google in search, Facebook in social networking, and Amazon in e-commerce. “Bitcoin is more contagious than all the other cryptocurrencies because it’s the first mover,” Yale economist Shiller says. “Just like Harvard is considered the most prestigious university because it was the first one” in the U.S.
Bitcoin’s uniquely set payout rate—which rewards “miners” for supporting the network with their computers—also helps make it more valuable. Prices of commodities like corn, oil, or gold often plunge when producers pump out supply to meet demand, creating inadvertent gluts. Bitcoin’s supply, in contrast, is forever fixed, by computer code, at a total of 21 million coins (of which about 80% have been produced). And nothing drives prices up like scarcity.
In the eyes of some supporters, these advantages add up to virtually unconstrained upside. Cybersecurity pioneer John McAfee recently set a $1 million price target for Bitcoin by 2020 (revised upward from $500,000). Others say the market value could match gold’s, which clocks in at $9.7 trillion—roughly $460,000 per coin.
Still, even Bitcoin’s greatest backers acknowledge the possibility that the cryptocurrency’s value could plummet—if, say, regulators in China or the U.S. decided to effectively outlaw it, or if a better and more functional blockchain superseded it. It would hardly be the first craze that fizzled fast. “I think of these as high-tech Beanie Babies or 21st-century tulips,” says Robert Hockett, a law professor at Cornell who gained notoriety after the financial crisis for proposing that cities use “eminent domain” to buy out underwater mortgages. Hockett sees echoes of that disaster in Bitcoin-mania. After a securities regulator warned that people were taking out mortgage loans to speculate on Bitcoin, he noted the irony: “It’s almost as though the cosmic joker out there is pulling our legs as maximally as possible.”
Hockett believes blockchain tech will prove a game-changer. But he can’t understand the fascination with Bitcoin, given its copious flaws. As the original cryptocurrency, Bitcoin suffers from drawbacks typical of first-generation technology. Transactions lack privacy, and fees commonly run as high as $20, even for transfers of small sums. Hackers run rampant. And the entire network can currently handle, at most, only seven transactions per second, compared to the thousands that Visa and Mastercard process in the same span. “It’s a bit like betting only on Betamax when new video technology was coming online in the 1980s,” Hockett says.
Jim Rickards, chief strategist at Meraglim, a financial analytics firm, views Bitcoin with equal fatalism. “I’m extremely bullish on the future” of blockchains, he says, “but I view Bitcoin as a Neanderthal, an evolutionary dead end.”
An Endangered Species?
When British scientists first encountered the platypus in the late 18th century, they suspected a hoax. The animal didn’t fit in their conventional taxonomic categories. It looked like a mole, but it had a duck’s bill, a beaver’s tail, and an otter’s feet. Plus, it was venomous and laid eggs. Still, “after really careful examination, they said, ‘This is real!’ ” says Spencer Bogart, head of research at Blockchain Capital, a venture capital firm devoted to cryptocurrencies and related tech.
Bogart is deploying a favorite analogy: “Just like the platypus is not good at being a reptile, a beaver, a duck, or an otter, but it’s great at being a platypus; Bitcoin is not good at being a currency, a commodity, or a fintech company, but it’s great at being Bitcoin. It’s creating its own category and asset class.”
When skeptics dismiss Bitcoin, bulls like Bogart push back. Unlike gold, Bitcoin is not static. The software code is under constant development. Its features can be tweaked, improved, and “forked” into new iterations, with the potential to unlock value in as yet unimagined ways. Many Bitcoin fans, for example, have high hopes for the “Lightning Network,” an improvement designed to facilitate quicker payments. If Bitcoin, in its evolution, acquires more compelling utility—making cross-border payments cheap and fast, for example, or enabling “smart” contracts that encode business relationships and automatically disburse payments—those who own stakes in the finite currency could find other would-be users, possibly even deep-pocketed corporations, clamoring to buy from them.
For many, this is reason enough to play the long game. Most of the earliest investors seem to be doing just that. People who have held Bitcoin for at least three years—so-called HODLers, a name that stems from a typo for “hold” in an online forum—are largely still HODLing. Their Bitcoins accounted for only 4% of the Bitcoins moved in 2017 to cryptocurrency exchanges, according to research provided to Fortune by Chainalysis, a digital forensics firm. Since moving to an exchange is a rough proxy for an intention to sell, this suggests the vast majority are keeping their windfall in reserve.
There are many reasons, of course, to take the wait-and-see approach with Bitcoin—from the fact that it could be worth double tomorrow, to the reality that there are currently few nonspeculative ways to actually spend or use it. The wealth management giant Fidelity, for one, allows employees to buy lunch with Bitcoin in the company cafeteria, but so far the program has been a dud. After all, paying $5 in Bitcoin for a sandwich today could be like paying $100 next Christmas. No one knows.
Therein lies a problem: If a cryptocurrency is too volatile to spend, it can’t be a useful currency. On the other hand, if it did someday stabilize and become widely used, its soaring prices would flatten out; it’ll be the “boring investment” that broker Martin Garcia fears. Either outcome—proof that Bitcoin can’t work as a currency, or proof that it can—could suck speculative money out of Bitcoin and precipitate a painful crash. Meanwhile, if the HODLers are sitting on Bitcoins until the currency achieves widespread functionality, just how long will they be willing to wait? “If three years becomes 10 years, the market will collapse,” says investor Novogratz. And in any of these scenarios, Bitcoin’s decentralized nature means there are few if any levers regulators (or anyone else) can pull to put a floor under a Bitcoin implosion.
Still, big players have decided these are risks well worth taking. Bubbles usually pop after the “dumb money” chases the smart money, but until now, it has mostly been individuals and small investors who have driven the Bitcoin phenomenon. While people can buy fractions of Bitcoin in increments of as little as $1 on cryptocurrency exchanges, institutional investors have largely been barred from those venues owing to fiduciary and compliance requirements around custody of assets.
Now that’s starting to change. Companies like Coinbase and BitGo are rolling out products catering to heavyweight investors, as even the most staid hedge funds and sovereign wealth managers come knocking. Goldman Sachs (gs) is said to be considering launching a Bitcoin trading operation. (The bank’s sole cryptocurrency-related investment to date, a startup called Circle, already operates a trading desk.) According to the bulls, the influx of smart money could eclipse all the wealth currently invested in Bitcoin—theoretically more than doubling the market value in one fell swoop.
And there’s another reason to believe Bitcoin can go up a lot more before gravity drags its value back down to something stable. Historically, some of the frothiest bubbles have been relatively confined: the 17th-century Dutch tulip bubble left little collateral damage beyond the Netherlands; the dotcom boom blew up Silicon Valley, but international stock markets rebounded relatively quickly. Today, however, anyone in the world can buy Bitcoin—including unbanked peoples ranging from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe who have never had access to capital markets before. “The fact that this is our first global mania,” adds Novogratz, “will make this the single most speculative bubble of our lifetimes.”
What’s Next
For those reasons and more, says Novogratz, “it wouldn’t be crazy if the crypto bubble hit $10 trillion, and that’s 20 times more than what it is today.” By comparison, he adds, Nasdaq stocks hit a market value of more than $6 trillion before the dotcom bubble burst, not accounting for inflation.
Of course, the Nasdaq included Microsoft (msft), Intel (intc), and many other companies that were established business powerhouses, before and after the crash. Bitcoin, for now, remains a platypus of unproven worth. Even the CEO of Coinbase, one of the biggest beneficiaries of the mania, harbors concerns about it. “We probably are in a bubble,” Brian Armstrong confides to Fortune following a recent all-hands meeting. With the total market valuation of all cryptocurrencies well above $500 billion, and few opportunities to put these coins to real use, Armstrong worries that “we haven’t really earned the value of that half trillion.” Nonetheless, in his experience, each time Bitcoin’s price has surged, the valuation has leveled off at a higher plateau—even after crashes.
The more Bitcoin’s price runs ahead of its capabilities, bulls say, the more likely that its technology may catch up to the hype. “The financial speculation that’s going on … is so important to developing infrastructure,” says Demirors of the Digital Currency Group. The gusher incentivizes programmers and businesspeople to dedicate time and effort to Bitcoin-related projects. Already, farsighted zealots are pouring newfound riches into the cryptocurrency economy, creating blockchain-oriented businesses, like the Winklevoss twins’ Gemini, or starting cryptocurrency-specific hedge funds, as AngelList founder Naval Ravikant is doing. It takes money to make money.
Then again, the more wealth that flows into Bitcoin, the more conservative an approach its maintainers may take in updating it. This could present an opportunity for other crypto coins to outmaneuver their forerunner. “I think Bitcoin’s market share is a long-term downward trend because there are so many other interesting technologies being created,” says Olaf Carlson-Wee, founder of crypto hedge fund Polychain Capital. He adds: “As a rule of thumb, I never bet against cryptocurrencies.”
To Jerry Brito of Coin Center, the future of Bitcoin isn’t about just the potential for limitless returns, but the promise that his daughter will grow up in a better world. “It’s a world where you can keep your money safe … where you can trade with anybody else in the world,” he says. Bitcoin’s allure, in this view, is not about the money, per se, but about technology. Maybe that’s why Brito insists there’s no fiscal significance in the name he and his wife eventually chose for the baby. They call her Penny—but it’s short for Penelope.
A version of this article appears in the Jan. 1, 2018 issue of Fortune with the headline “How High Will Bitcoin Go?”
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