Bitcoin is not a fad
Bitcoin is following the pattern of a transformative technology, not the pattern of fads and bubbles.
Bitcoin is less like beanie babies and more like the printing press, electricity, the telegraph, or the internet. It's been around long enough that the risk it will spontaneously cease to exist is essentially zero. Bitcoin is now being reckoned with in the great halls of power. It's being used by families to serve as a foundation for redesigning personal financial plans. It's increasingly showing up in retirement accounts, in trusts, and in estate planning structures. And while using bitcoin according to its principles doesn't come easy, the institutions and tools needed to help people steward this new asset class are growing and maturing rapidly.
The most common reason people avoid bitcoin is the concern that its best days are behind it. People got excited, and some made a lot of money quickly. Every time bitcoin falls in price, these concerns come to the forefront. Skeptics feel validated, and claim that the inevitable collapse to zero is finally underway. Some have been staunch in their confidence that bitcoin is nothing more than a speculative bubble, including the most famous bubble trader of all time:
I think that bitcoin at $100,000 is the most ridiculous thing that sane people are sitting on TV talking about. It's not worth anything. Everybody's accepted it. It's the tulip bulb of our time.
Michael Burry · The Big Short investor · December 2025
But the collapse to zero they've been predicting never quite arrives. Instead, bitcoin falls less than it did before, turns around, and reaches higher highs. Each downturn finds a higher floor than the last, as new buyers recognize the value and step in. Seventeen years of that pattern is difficult to explain as a fad.
If we examine some of the most famous examples of fads from history, such as the 17th century tulip mania in the Netherlands, the beanie baby craze, or the dot-com bubble of the late 1990s, we find that they share features in common. There was one giant spike that plummeted back to where it started, all within a period of less than 5 years. It didn't take long for people to sniff out the falsehoods supporting them, at which point the frenzy was over — permanently.
Famous bubbles compared
Fads come and go, while bitcoin keeps rebounding.
All charts use the same 20-year x-axis (peak normalized to 100). Lines end where trackable history ends. NASDAQ data uses verified year-end closing prices. Bitcoin uses compressed y-scale to show all cycles. Past performance does not guarantee future results.
Bitcoin has had numerous consecutive price spikes, and none have ever fallen back to where they started. The overall trend is an undeniable upward trajectory, despite the short-term panics. The pattern bitcoin exhibits is indeed more comparable to the early days of a transformative business or technology. Excitement, fear, optimism and uncertainty create a wild ride as society gradually figures out that it is, in fact, a big deal. Some people dismissed automobiles at first, claiming "a horseless carriage is a toy for the rich." Western Union decided not to buy Alexander Graham Bell's patent for the telephone, when it was offered for only $100,000. Amazon had double-digit drawdowns in every one of its early years. But when was the right time to sell? Never.
They called these fads too
Every transformative technology was written off during its early crashes. The pattern never changes.
Bitcoin's price consistently recovering over many market cycles across more than a decade is not the only reason it's not a fad. It's not a fad for underlying reasons; it's fundamentally different from crypto and modern-day sovereign currencies. And it has properties that can help us place it in the storied history of money as a technology humans use to coordinate.