Bitcoin breaks through $9,500! Market value exceeds Disney and General Electric

Bitcoin has gotten even crazier since Thanksgiving.

On Sunday, Eastern Time, the price of Bitcoin soared wildly during the intraday trading session, breaking through five historical records of $9,000, $9,100, $9,200, $9,300, and $9,400. The CoinDesk platform showed that Bitcoin reached a high of $9,484.91.

According to the Bitfinex Bitcoin quotation platform, in early Asian trading on Monday, the price of Bitcoin broke through the $9,500 mark, setting a new historical high.

After breaking through $8,000, the price of Bitcoin started to soar, rising by nearly $1,500 in less than a week. The cumulative increase in the past two weeks has been nearly 60%, and the increase this year has exceeded 900%.

The rapid rise has pushed the total market value of Bitcoin to over US$156 billion, which is higher than the market value of the old industrial giant GE (General Electric), and even Disney has lost to it.

Not only Bitcoin, the CoinMarketCap platform shows that the price of Ethereum, also a digital currency, also hit an all-time high on Saturday, reaching $485.19.

Ethereum’s cumulative increase this year is even more astonishing, reaching 5,000%, while Litecoin has also increased more than 20 times this year.

"This wave appears to be driven by retail investors," BKCM CEO Brian Kelly was quoted as saying by CNBC.

U.S. media quoted statistics from Bespoke Investment Group LLC., saying that on Coinbase, one of the world's largest bitcoin trading platforms, the number of bitcoin trading accounts has almost tripled in the past year, with more than 100,000 new accounts added in just three days between Thanksgiving and Black Friday, and now as many as 13.1 million.

“Everyone I know at our community Thanksgiving dinner is talking about Bitcoin, and it’s spurring a lot of families to buy it,” Brian Kelly said. “I’d guess it’s happening on every dinner table in America.”

If the current trend continues, perhaps billionaire venture capitalist Tim Draper's prediction in September 2014 that Bitcoin prices will rise to $10,000 in the next three years will soon come true. At that time, Bitcoin was "only" worth $413.

Not surprisingly, the digital currency "bubble theory" is also rampant in the market.

“Bitcoin is the biggest bubble of our time,” said Mike Novogratz, a former macro fund manager at Fortress Investment Group who now runs his own digital currency fund with more than $500 million under management.

However, he also said that although there is a bubble, the craze about Bitcoin makes sense because it represents technological progress and is expected to fundamentally change our lives:

I can hear the herd coming. Remember, bubbles happen in things that fundamentally change life. The railroads changed the way we live, and so did the dot-com bubble. When you look five, ten years into the future, the odds really get your animal spirits going.