Bitcoin: The Longest Running Mania – Tulips of the 21st Century?

Abstract

Almost four centuries later, the Dutch tulipmania of the 17th century is always mentioned as a mania and used as a reference point in the aftermath of contemporaneous economic and financial crises since the late 1990s. Studies investigating what drove the tulip speculation throughout 17th and 18th centuries ignored market fundamentals, which we believe were the driving forces in Bitcoin price speculation and the ensuing crash. Bitcoin mania is far from a true madness, the increased frequency in its boom-and-bust cycle since 2017 comes from the cryptocurrency market’s extreme reactionary mode to any good or bad news from regulators and central banks (the Fed and ECB in particular) as well as security issues related to cyberattacks. In a matter of several months, the price of Bitcoin skyrocketed from $2,000 in April 2017 to the intraday high of $20,089 on December 17, 2017. The potential Bitcoin bubble occurred in the end of 2017, Bitcoin price surged from $5,600 to $20,089 in October–December 2017 and crashed in January 2018.

Keywords: Bitcoin; Asset Price Bubbles; Booms and Busts; Tulipmania; Blockchain

JEL Classification: D84, E32, E44, G01, G12, G38, O40, R31