Bitcoin blasts past $50,000

Bitcoin has surpassed the magical $50,000 barrier.

It feels surreal, but then again, so it did when Bitcoin first hit $10,000 back in 2017 and $20,000 in 2020. The digital currency, often dismissed as a bubble, just keeps coming back.

Bitcoin's total market cap — the collective value of all the bitcoins in existence — is dangerously close to reaching 1 trillion dollars. It currently sits at more than $930 billion, according to cryptocurrency price tracking site CoinGecko.

Despite the constant price rise over the years, Bitcoin is still highly volatile. The price of one bitcoin briefly reached $50,689 on the popular exchange Binance, but it plummeted just as fast, and is sitting at around $49,500 at writing time.

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SEE ALSO: Tesla bought $1.5 billion worth of Bitcoin

Bitcoin has been particularly lively in the last week or so, ever since Tesla announced it invested $1.5 billion of its treasury money into Bitcoin. The price jumped by more than 20 percent on the announcement — from roughly $38,000 to more than $46,000 in a day — and it seems the bullish run isn't over yet.

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Another catalyst for the most recent price increase is likely MicroStrategy's announcement on Tuesday that it will offer $600 million worth of convertible senior notes, and that it "intends to use the net proceeds from the sale of the notes to acquire additional bitcoins."

MicroStrategy was one of the first major companies to invest heavily into Bitcoin; the company has invested more than a billion dollars so far, and its CEO, Michael Saylor, has often publicly expressed his opinion that holding BTC is superior, long term, to holding cash.

Disclosure: The author of this text owns, or has recently owned, a number of cryptocurrencies, including BTC and ETH.