Bitcoin’s 9,000,000% rise this decade leaves skeptics aghast

By Vildana Hajric / Bloomberg News 

If in the throes of this bull market’s earliest stages of recovery someone told you to forgo stocks, forget commodities, renounce fixed-income assets and buy an unknown digital token, the first of its kind, and watch it grow beyond your wildest dreams, you’d call them crazy, right?

Emerging out of the ashes of
the financial crisis, Bitcoin was created as a bypass to the banks and
government agencies mired in Wall Street’s greatest calamity in decades. At
first, it was slow to break through, muddied by a slew of scandals: fraud,
thefts and scams that turned away many and brought closer regulatory scrutiny.
But once it burst into the mainstream, it proved to be the decade’s
best-performing asset.

The largest digital token,
trading around $7,200, has posted gains of more than 9,000,000 percent since
July 2010, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

“Bitcoin really captured that
wild technology enthusiasm that ‘this time…