Bitcoin Hits $100K: The Number Everyone Said Was Impossible

On the evening of Wednesday 4 December 2024 in New York, already Thursday morning in Hong Kong, the price of one bitcoin passed $100,000 for the first time. A few hours earlier, President-elect Donald Trump had said he would nominate Paul Atkins, a former commissioner of the Securities and Exchange Commission and a known friend of the crypto industry, to run the SEC in place of Gary Gensler, the regulator whose SEC had spent his term suing crypto firms. Bitcoin reached about $103,800 that night, according to AFP. Atkins had been an SEC commissioner from 2002 to 2008 and then founded a risk consultancy, Patomak Global Partners, that advised financial firms.

At that price the roughly 19.8 million bitcoin then in existence were worth close to $2 trillion together. A number that had been a slogan for years, printed on T-shirts and in social media profiles, was on the screen.

Fifteen years to six figures

Bitcoin had no price at all when it started in January 2009. In May 2010 a programmer in Florida, Laszlo Hanyecz, paid 10,000 bitcoin for two pizzas, the first well-known purchase with it. It passed $1,000 in late 2013, came close to $20,000 in December 2017, and reached about $69,000 in November 2021.

That 2021 run was when $100,000 became a target. Supporters added glowing "laser eyes" to their profile pictures and promised to keep them until bitcoin hit six figures, many by the end of 2021. Instead it fell below $16,000 in November 2022, after the collapse of the Terra stablecoin project and of FTX, then one of the world's biggest crypto exchanges.

What pushed it over

Three things happened in 2024. In January the SEC approved spot bitcoin exchange-traded funds, funds whose shares trade on the stock market like any company's and which hold real bitcoin. For the first time, anyone with a brokerage or retirement account could buy bitcoin through a ticker symbol, and big investors poured in. BlackRock's fund, IBIT, became the fastest-growing ETF on record, reaching $10 billion of assets in 49 trading days. Every dollar that went into the funds had to be used to buy real bitcoin, a steady daily demand that had not existed before.

In April came the fourth halving. Bitcoin pays the computers that secure its network, called miners, in newly created coins, and every four years or so the code cuts that payment in half, like a gold mine whose output drops by half on a fixed schedule. On 20 April 2024, at block 840,000, the reward fell from 6.25 to 3.125 bitcoin per block, slowing the flow of new coins onto the market.

Then came politics. At the Bitcoin 2024 conference in Nashville on 27 July, Trump promised to make the United States "the crypto capital of the planet", told the crowd "On day one, I will fire Gary Gensler", and pledged to keep 100 percent of the bitcoin the government held or acquired in future. He won the election on 5 November. Within a month the Atkins nomination sealed the change of tone at the SEC, and the price crossed the line.

Who was holding

The biggest single buyer was a company. Strategy, the business software firm formerly called MicroStrategy, began buying bitcoin in 2020 under its co-founder and executive chairman, Michael Saylor, paying for it by selling new shares and issuing debt. It has kept buying through every rise and fall since. On 12 October 2026 it reported holding 848,250 bitcoin, bought for $64 billion at an average of $75,444 each, more than 4 percent of all the bitcoin that will ever exist, and worth about $70 billion at mid-October prices.

The US government followed in its own way. On 6 March 2025 Trump signed an executive order creating a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve, made up of bitcoin the government had seized in criminal cases, and ordering that it not be sold.

A waypoint, not a floor

Six figures did not hold. Bitcoin reached about $109,000 on the day of Trump's inauguration, 20 January 2025, and set its all-time high of $126,080 on 6 October 2025. Four days later, on 10 October, Trump threatened an extra 100 percent tariff on Chinese goods, and the crypto market suffered its biggest single-day wipeout of leveraged bets, trades made with borrowed money that exchanges close automatically when the price moves against them: about $19 billion. In mid-November 2025 bitcoin closed below $100,000 again.

The fall continued into 2026. In June, investors pulled a record amount out of the bitcoin ETFs, and on 1 July bitcoin fell through $60,000 to around $58,000, less than half its October peak. It recovered over the summer and traded near $82,000 on 16 October 2026, according to CoinGecko: well above the 2021 high that the laser-eyes crowd fell short of, but 35 percent below the record and $18,000 short of the number this page is named after.

Anyone who bought at $100,000 in December 2024 was sitting on a loss of about 18 percent nearly two years later. The milestone was real. It turned out to be a point on the way up and on the way down, not a floor.