Bitcoin Beats Buffett, $588.17 Billion to $543.68 Billion

The first few days of 2021 have been wild, to say the very least.

During the 24 hours leading up to Monday’s old-school opening bell, Bitcoin (BTC, Tech/Adoption Grade “A-”) traded as high as $34,017.15 and as low as $28,722.76.

Indeed, on Saturday, BTC hit $34,608.56 on coinmarketcap.com. It’s a rally that’s earned the King of Crypto a spot on the front page of the print edition of the Financial Times.

Bitcoin’s price was $31,638.19 as of 9:25 a.m. EST today, down 8.6% from that new high. But that’s still good for a market capitalization of $588,168,568,943.78. For sake of ease, that’s $588.17 billion.

Now — and not just for reference sake — Berkshire Hathaway Inc.’s (NYSE: BRK/A) market cap as of Monday morning was $543.68 billion.

We haven’t even gotten around to shenanigans in and about Washington D.C. that can only undermine faith in U.S. institutions — at home and abroad. That includes the obvious, headline-generating activities of elected officials, as well as the relatively more subtle moves by unelected policymakers at the Federal Reserve.

Altogether, distortions created by fiscal and monetary policymakers have investors — big institutions and pioneering individuals alike — seeking alternatives.

Bitcoin’s parabolic price action reflects the “store of value” trade. At the same time, on the “applications” side of the blockchain revolution, Ethereum (ETH, Tech/Adoption Grade “A”) is actually rising faster than the “master.”

And people are starting to notice.

We wrote about ETH in the Dec. 30 Weiss Crypto Alert: “Year to date, Ethereum is up a blistering 469% — compared to Bitcoin’s 281%. Moreover, there are solid reasons to expect ETH will continue making more money for investors in 2021.”

We identified seven reasons why ETH will probably “reclaim its prior all-time-high (near $1,200) in 2021.”

That includes the fact that “ETH is the leading smart-contract platform in crypto,” with “the most developers working on it.”

Also, more than $1 trillion in transactions were recorded on the Ethereum blockchain in 2020, a total “that dwarfs even global payment-services titan PayPal with its 350 million-plus customers.”

Last week, we said it looked like ETH “is likely at least 40% undervalued.” Of course, it was trading at “$700 and change” then.

Today, it’s above $1,000, having touched $1,153.19 in the last 24 hours, according to coinmarketcap.com.

In old-school financial markets, it’s understood that new all-time highs are good things; they usually portend more new highs to come.

Given the emerging fundamentals — for both the “store of value” and the “use” cases — we’d say it’s safe to say the same should be true for crypto.

Best,

Juan and Bruce