Bitcoin price has finally broken through the psychological US$10,000 [AU$14,480] barrier today, while also dragging altcoins to favorable gains.

The price of Bitcoin has gone up by nearly $650 over the past 24 hours, reaching a then-fresh YTD high of $9768 yesterday before continuing to climb to where it currently sits at $10,193.

Bitcoin has shown its resilience time and time again this year, proving the naysayers wrong in their predictions that the creation of Satoshi was a passing fad or Ponzi scheme.

Coming out of the crypto winter

2018 was a painful year for BTC enthusiasts as the cryptocurrency fell from its all-time high of nearly $20,000 in mid-December 2017.

The entire cryptocurrency market crashed and entered a “crypto winter” where many coins lost as much as 80% of their value.

As the bear market of 2018 continued into 2019, fears that Bitcoin was dying and moving into a “nuclear winter” began to manifest.

2019 began with Bitcoin price trading at a sluggish $3,765, and the virtual currency traded laterally throughout February and March.

It was in April when BTC finally started coming out of the doldrums and clawed its way past the $5,000 barrier, and the following month saw Bitcoin hit $6,000.

As Bitcoin price began to move up, optimism began to return and noted Bitcoin bulls like Tom Lee predicted that the “crypto winter” was finally ending.

As the month of May progressed, Bitcoin continued to rise in value, hitting $7,000 on May 12th and then $8,000 the following day.

Bitcoin then danced around the $8,000 mark until mid-June where it broke through $9,000.

As the price of Bitcoin shot up, so too did the number of active addresses on its blockchain, reaching over one million on June 14th.

Breaking through

Now, at long last, the world’s first cryptocurrency has achieved the milestone of pushing past $10,000, which is a notable psychological barrier.

Back in May, Tom Lee said that BTC hitting $10,000 would usher in a lot of interest from institutional investors who were just waiting on the sidelines to see how things in the crypto ecosystem would shake out.

“I think what’s getting investors quite optimistic is that now that bitcoin is approaching that $10,000 level, I think that there’s an increasing chance that traditional, non-crypto investors, traditional financial investors, are going to start to look at crypto again,” Lee said.

“And that’s very important, obviously, because bringing in that new sort of interest and demand into crypto could really push bitcoin to its all-time high,” he added.