Bitcoin at one hundred thousand: the bubble that kept not popping
Bitcoin crossed $100,000 in December 2024, a figure that would have seemed absurd a decade ago. The milestone says as much about the money system as about the asset.
On the evening of 5 December 2024, Bitcoin crossed one hundred thousand dollars for the first time, closing the week at a level that would have been barely imaginable ten years earlier, when a single coin traded in the hundreds. The move came after a year of extraordinary gains, with the price roughly doubling in the months after the November election and rising more than 140 per cent over the year. To the people who have held the asset through its collapses, the number was a vindication; to its critics, it was confirmation of a bubble that has somehow refused to burst on schedule.
The scale of the ascent is worth putting plainly. A year earlier the price sat near forty thousand. Within weeks of the election it broke through record after record, and by early December it had passed one hundred thousand, helped by signs that the incoming administration would treat the industry warmly. The turning point for the asset’s legitimacy had arguably come earlier, with the approval of the first spot exchange-traded funds in January 2024, which let ordinary investors buy exposure through regulated markets. The flows into those funds have been the engine of much of the year’s buying.
What has changed, and what has not, is the crux. The industry likes to say that Bitcoin has matured: it is now a store of value, an inflation hedge, an institutional asset. There is truth in the shift. The presence of regulated ETFs, large corporate holdings and Wall Street trading desks means the market is not the pure retail casino of a decade ago. But the fundamentals that critics cite have not disappeared. Bitcoin produces no cash flow, has no balance sheet and no use value beyond what people choose to assign it; its price is a collective agreement about a digital scarcity. That is not a fatal objection, but it is a reminder that the asset rests on belief in a way that a dividend-paying stock does not.
The more interesting question is what the milestone reveals about the wider system. The rise to one hundred thousand happened alongside sustained inflation anxiety and unprecedented levels of government debt, and the appeal of an asset that cannot be printed by any central bank has grown precisely because so much conventional money is being created. In that sense the rally is not only a story about a niche technology; it is a commentary on the trust people are willing to extend to the institutions that manage the world’s currency.
There are real costs in the euphoria. Late entrants buy at the top, and the history of the asset is a sequence of brutal drawdowns after record highs. For a newcomer, the risk of buying at one hundred thousand is not theoretical. The responsible reading of the milestone is neither celebration nor contempt but the recognition that Bitcoin has crossed a threshold of acceptance that makes it impossible to dismiss, while remaining, by its nature, a bet on the future rather than an investment in the present. The number matters; what comes after the number matters more.