CNN Starting to Believe in Bitcoin? Adds Bitcoin Ticker
If there was any doubt in your mind that Bitcoin is going places, then it may be time to banish them for good. This past Wednesday, CNN Money announced on its Twitter account that they were going to introduce a Bitcoin ticker on their show. Bitcoin has come of age.
It was just last month, January 2015, that an article appeared on the CNN Money website that raised doubts on the long term prospects for a Bitcoin rebound. This was in the wake of the poor performance of Bitcoin in 2014, a year that saw the cryptocurrency plunge by up to 60%. Matters were not any better in the first weeks of the new year 2015, which saw Bitcoin down by another 30%. In fact, Bitcoin went so far as to breach the $200 support level, making venture capitalist Jeffrey Gundlach proclaim that Bitcoin was
“on its way to being relegated to the ash heap of digital currencies.”
It was the worst of times for Bitcoin then, and it is perhaps in that context that CNN asked if Bitcoin was ever going to rebound. Rebound it has as it inches upwards into the neighborhood of the $250 mark.
A few weeks after the article predicting Bitcoin’s demise, CNN did two more stories that seemed to temper their gloom on the future of Bitcoin. The first was with the Winklevoss brothers, internet entrepreneurs and true believers in Bitcoin, who believe that the currency will one day be worth $1 trillion. The article even went so far as to quote Tyler Winklevoss, who believed that Bitcoin was “a type of gold-like asset” which would eventually see more growth in terms of market capitalization.
Some of the replies to the CNN Money announcement were less than forgiving, however. One of the tweets from @bitcoinbelle asked
“How is that humble pie tasting?”
@feulf tweeted,
“Bitcoin on CNN? That means that Bitcoin traders are getting out (sic) their puberty.”
Overall, other tweets were charitable to CNN. Some even went to call it a revolution for digital money.
And just today, CCN.com carried a story of Morgan Spurlock, who hosts the CNN show Inside Man. He aired an episode of a time in 2014 when he lived on nothing but Bitcoin. In the show, Spurlock was able to book a flight to Geneva, work for a Bitcoin mining company for which he was paid, and even tried to spend his newly earned wages which he failed to do.
CNN is bound to be a loud megaphone for Bitcoin. With the kind of publicity that CNN Money provides, Bitcoin is going to attract more and more attention. Some of that attention will also come from criminals. At this point in early 2015, it would appear that several factors are flowing into a convergence that will bode well for Bitcoin in the near future.
The media coverage, the ecosystem and the regulatory environment that is becoming more and more adaptive point to a much stabler environment for Bitcoin. If this happens, then it may be time even now to take Tyler Winklevoss’ prediction a little more seriously. And if that comes to pass we can only hope that CNN will still be around to cover the story.
