Bitcoin Could Overtake Apple’s Market Cap in Five Years 🚨 This article is 7 years old...
Bitcoin Could Overtake Apple’s Market Cap in Five Years
2 min read
Updated: Nov. 13, 2017 at 6:55 pm UTC
Cover art/illustration via CryptoSlate. Image includes combined content which may include AI-generated content.
This week, Apple’s new flagship phone, the much anticipated iPhone X, arrived for pre-sale. Within minutes, the ordering bonanza of Apple’s most expensive iPhone ever created shipping delays that exceeded a month.
The event was a potent reminder of Apple’s consumer marketplace dominance. Accordingly, for well over a decade, Apple’s stock price has steadily risen to make it one of the most valuable companies on earth, with a chart-topping market cap of $862.39 billion.
Still, in the shadows all this Apple euphoria, Bitcoin has been setting its own growth records. Bitcoin recently passed $6,000 for this first time, and it’s already on a steady pace toward $7,000. This year, Bitcoin has transcended its niche status and has taken off as a drastically more usable and more valuable currency than its earlier iterations.
This trend is the impetus behind Seeking Alpha blogger Ronnie Moas’s recent predictions that —
“Within five years, [Bitcoin] is going to catch Apple…”
While on the surface it sounds ridiculous that a once fringe cryptocurrency could become more valuable than a company like Apple, it’s worth noting that Bitcoin is already more valuable than investment bank Goldman Sachs and many other companies like it.
Of course, many fear that Bitcoin’s value is a bubble that’s waiting to burst. Just last week, CNBC reported on UBS’s conclusion that “Cryptocurrencies like bitcoin are in a ‘speculative bubble’…and it is ‘highly doubtful’ that these will ever become mainstream currencies.” UBS isn’t the only company that has spoken out against the sudden rise of cryptocurrencies.
Many high-profile financial leaders have been outspoken critics of Bitcoin and its ascendance. Perhaps the most popular and the most potent critic, Jamie Dimon of J.P. Morgan Chase, has repeatedly criticized the cryptocurrency and has often likened it to fraud.
Still, Moas and others are quick to point out that Dimon and other traditional banking loyalists are unlikely to publicly embrace Bitcoin because it is a disruptive force that directly competes with their industry.
Some major trends including Goldman Sachs initiative to create a Bitcoin-centered trading product and CME Group’s development of a Bitcoin futures contract signal that Moas may be right about the future of Bitcoin’s value. Projects like these further legitimize Bitcoin’s place in financial markets, which promises to further proliferate Bitcoin’s use cases and value potential.
Thus far, Moas’s Bitcoin predictions have been accurate. Earlier this year, when Bitcoin was value was still in the mid-two-thousands, Moas predicted that it would quickly exceed $5,000. It has, and it continues to accelerate.
Now, Moas is predicting that Bitcoin could climb to $50,000 within ten years – a tenfold increase. It’s a prediction that once sounded outlandish but now feels entirely possible.
We don’t know exactly what Bitcoin’s future looks like, but Moas and others no longer sound ridiculous for predicting its ascendance. With Bitcoin’s current rate, Apple is going to need to sell a few more iPhones to keep pace with Bitcoin’s staggering rise.
Posted In: Analysis
