Hi, I'm Dan Pramak and welcome to Axios Recap, presented by Facebook. Today is Wednesday, December 17th.

Weekly job list claims are up, snow is coming down outside the home podcast studio, and we're

focused on Bitcoin Mania. Bitcoin yesterday topped $20,000 for the first time ever, and then it just kept going.

At the time of this taping, it's at over $23,600 per coin, which means it's up 25% in just the last week

and more than 200% for the year.

Why does it matter?

Well, that depends on who you are and who you ask.

If you're someone who holds Bitcoin, has it in their account somewhere, or even just

a bit of Bitcoin, you're sitting on a pretty big paper return.

If you're one of those Bitcoin evangelists or someone who bought in years ago, you've got

the return plus a huge amount of,

I told you so, validation.

More broadly speaking, though, there's an argument that this price surge moves Bitcoin

a bit more toward becoming a global reserve currency or a currency that the world central banks

hold.

Right now, that's the US dollar.

And Bitcoin for sure is a long ways away from that in

terms of scale and doesn't have anywhere near the widespread acceptance of something like the U.S.

dollar, or even really the Canadian dollar. But it may be getting closer based on how many

traditional Wall Street money managers have begun buying in. One even just put a price target of

$400,000 per coin. And again,

all these traditional money managers buying Bitcoin is one of the reasons the price keeps going

...