The last bubble was in 2013.
Bitcoin is not a classic bubble, but still be 'suspicious,' says investing expert William Bernstein
https://www.cnbc.com/2017/10/24/william-bernstein-bitcoin-is-not-a-classic-bubble.html- William Bernstein is a neurologist who became a best-selling author on investing in the 1990s.
- Bernstein does not believe bitcoin is a classic investing bubble because it doesn't fit all four of the criteria of manias he developed.
- "Unless [you are] an expert on blockchain technology and bitcoin, stay away. Don't invest in things [you] don't understand," Bernstein told CNBC.
Do you think we're in the 5th bubble?
A bubble suggests the market cannot sustain the current price and it is bound to collapse down to a fraction of the current price. This is just not the case with Bitcoin if we're talking about long term - and I'm sure that all the bitcoin naysayers are talking long term, they think it will collapse and go to zero and Bitcoin will be gone. There have been a few previous temporary bubbles that popped and the price was down for a few months before rising back up, and the one longer term bubble in the wake of Nov 2013 run-up and the Mt. Gox hack, but if Mt.Gox hadn't collapsed the price likely would have returned back to $1000 within 6 months instead of taking 3 years.
The potential Bitcoin market is billions of users and its currently maybe 20 million users or so. It's about as far from a bubble that you can get. Besides it is bubbling and popping all the time now, just at a much more rapid rate with much smaller volatility than a few years ago. Already this year 3 main bubbles have come and gone just since May. Bubbles mean nothing for the long term growth of Bitcoin, they are really just corrections that serve to build up momentum for the next price rise.
In that article that was linked to, right from the beginning you can tell that while the author made be an expert in Bubbles, he doesn't understand Bitcoin at all. He says Bitcoin has no intrinsic value, which is the very first thing anyone who doesn't know anything about bitcoin says. He also said it's a very bad sign the price keeps rising, which doesn't make any sense. User adoption means the price rises. The fact that the price keeps rising is a very good sign - people are flooding into the market.
The fundamental mistake that people who don't get bitcoin make is that they try to look at it through the lens of a stock analysis. A stock can easily get away from the fundamentals of the value of the company underlying the stock when people get excited about good news for the company, because let's not forget all stock are already fairly mature when the first hit the market, because companies only IPO when they are ready to go public. Bitcoin has always been available to purchase or mine from its very conception, buying it now is like being a VC getting in on a startup when it still has a long way to go before it IPOs, and as an investor you are looking for 10x to 100x ROI. That's bitcoin at the current $8000 price. The fundamental (intrinsic) value of bitcoin is this: the billions of people in the world who are connected to the internet being able to sidestep banks and become their own bank, side step high credit card fees and digitally pay for things themselves, being able to send any amount of money DIRECTLY to anyone with no middlemen in an hour or less with barely any fee. That's revolutionary and an extremely high intrinsic value.