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

21 Pages Posted: 18 Dec 2019

See all articles by John Taskinsoy

John Taskinsoy

Universiti Malaysia Sarawak (UNIMAS)

Date Written: December 18, 2019

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

Suggested Citation

Taskinsoy, John, Bitcoin: The Longest Running Mania – Tulips of the 21st Century? (December 18, 2019). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3505953 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3505953

John Taskinsoy (Contact Author)

Universiti Malaysia Sarawak (UNIMAS) ( email )

94300 Kota Samarahan
Sarawak, Sarawak 94300
Malaysia

Do you have a job opening that you would like to promote on SSRN?

Paper statistics

Downloads
471
Abstract Views
1,745
Rank
94,751
PlumX Metrics