Key facts:
Bitcoin also displaced the world’s largest electronic components company.
The cryptocurrency is higher in value than the firms Visa, MasterCard and JP Morgan Chase Co.
The rise in the price of bitcoin, which occurred on January 2, 2021, when it reached USD 32 thousand, has led to its market value exceeding that of the Berkshire Hathaway company, led by the American billionaire Warren Buffet.
The capitalization of bitcoin, the sum of its price multiplied by the total number of bitcoins in circulation, reached $ 607 billion today. Below this value, the cryptocurrency exceeds the market value of Berkshire Hathaway’s Class B shares, which stand at $ 543 billion, according to Google Finance.
Berkshire Hathaway Inc. is a holding company for insurance, energy, distribution, manufacturing and retail companies, as well as investment funds, of US origin. In 2019, it reported revenues of 256 billion dollars, with a workforce of almost 400 thousand workers. Since 1962, Warren Buffet has bought shares in the company.
Bitcoin has managed to comfortably become the ninth largest asset by market capitalization, displacing the world-renowned firms Visa and MasterCard. Even the world’s largest electronic circuit company, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufactoring, which is ranked number 10 above Berkshire Hataway, has been displaced by Bitcoin.
Before the end of 2020, bitcoin with a market capitalization of $ 505 billion it surpassed Visa, the world’s largest finance company valued at $ 497 billion.
According to a report released by the analysis firm Datalight, the average value of transactions carried out in bitcoin exceeds that of traditional means of payments Visa and MasterCard. Each transaction in BTC equals, on average, USD 40,000, while those of the aforementioned systems do not even reach USD 100 on average, as reported by CriptoNoticias.
The main cryptocurrency remains above the two giants of financial services and the largest bank in the world, JP Morgan Chase & Co, as reported by this outlet.
Ahead of bitcoin in the eighth, seventh and sixth places respectively, are: Alibaba Group Holding, Tesla and Tencent, according to the AssetDash site.
Warren Buffet: “Bitcoin is a gaming device.”
In the past, Warren Buffet spoke of bitcoin as worthless and vowed that he would never own cryptocurrency in an interview with CNBC, as CriptoNoticias reported.
The American investor expressed that cryptocurrencies “basically have no value and do not produce anything”, adding that “you can’t do anything with them except sell them to someone else. In that case that person to whom you sold them now has the problem.
Later, the businessman returned to the attack against bitcoin and cryptocurrencies to disqualify them in a statement offered to reporters, the aforementioned social media reported.
“Bitcoin is a gaming device (…) there have been many scams related to it. There have been disappearances, so there is a lot lost in it. Bitcoin has not produced anything, “said the billionaire, ranked three in the list of richest men in the world since 2018, according to Fintech Zoom magazine.
To get Buffet to change his mind about cryptocurrencies, Tron CEO Justin Sun paid $ 4.5 million for a charity dinner and waited six months to chat with him.
But Buffet remained skeptical of the cryptocurrency issue, once again referring to bitcoin as “rat poison.«. Sun declined to comment on what was discussed at the dinner, as reported.