Bitcoin Up 500% Annually, Dominant Cryptocurrency Tops $100B Valuation
Currently, Bitcoin is trading at around $6,080, giving it a market cap of just over $100 billion. This is a meteoric rise from the start of the year, when Bitcoin was trading at just $968.
Not even negative commentary from some in the financial industry has been enough to dull the luster of Bitcoin. JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon declared back in September that Bitcoin is "just not a real thing" and that it would eventually be shut down completely. Dimon even took the tough stance that any JPMorgan trader that was found cozying up with Bitcoin would be fired immediately because "they are stupid".
Dimon went so far as to chastis his own daughter, who has seen the light when it comes to Bitcoin. "My daughter bought Bitcoin, it went up and now she thinks she's a genius." His daughter is probably laughing all the way to the bank now, as one Bitcoin was equal to $3,750 at the time that Dimon made his comments.
Even the shutdown of the second largest Bitcoin exchange in China hasn’t been enough to put the brakes on the cryptocurrency’s momentum.
Bitcoin is headed towards a SegWit2x hard fork in November, which has some concerned of how it will affect the cryptocurrency's valuation. SegWit2x brings with it code optimization called Segregated Witness (SegWit), and increases the network block size from 1MB to 2MB.
