Yesterday was a monumental day for bitcoin. For the first time ever, a single unity of the most mainstream of all cryptocurrencies surpassed the price of an ounce of gold. According to both CoinDesk's Bitcoin Price Index (BPI) and Coinbase, the value of a single bitcoin hit $1,238.11 at a time when Bloomberg reported the price of gold being $1,237.73 per ounce.
It's worth noting that this isn't a one-to-one valuation and that people aren't necessarily trading their gold for bitcoin. Value fluctuations in trade are normal, so yesterday's historic bitcoin valuations may well have been a product of a good trading day, whereas gold was just experiencing a bad one.
However, this was no outright fluke. The value of bitcoin has slowly been on the rise, as CoinDesk and Coinbase have tracked. The currency has been been recovering from an all-time low point of $200 per unit back in mid-2015 for more than a year now.
Gold has long been the standard as far as secure trading investments go, so bitcoin's rise may be indicative of how people are seeing cryptocurrency as more secure — a promise held by blockchain-based technologies.
As of the time of today's writing, CoinDesk's BPI puts a single bitcoin at $1,283.76, while Coinbase has it at $1,286.26. It's remained comparably higher than an ounce of gold, which Bloomberg puts at $1,228.03. We'll just have to wait to see how long bitcoin can remain on top.
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