The current situation may look like a real speculative bubble for the price of Bitcoin. However, the comparison with the two great speculative bubbles of the past seems to tell a different story.
The first big speculative bubble in the price of BTC took place in 2013.
In November 2012 there was the first halving, and the cutting in half of the production of new BTC resulted in a significant reduction of supply on the financial markets.
At the time of the halving, the price was around $12, and at the beginning of 2013 it had not yet moved very far from that threshold.
However, it soon began an initial rally that took it to above $100 in April and then settled at around that level until October.
At that point, a speculative bubble burst, totally unsustainable, taking the price to over $1,100 by the end of the year. The bubble burst around mid-December and the price plummeted to $360 in April 2014.
In other words, the incredible price increase of the first months of 2013, i.e. more than ten times in a few months, did not turn out to be a bubble, because the price from then on never fell below that figure again.
However, the one at the end of the year turned out to be a real speculative bubble, which then burst.
In July 2016 there was the second halving and something similar happened.
By the beginning of the following year, 2017, the price was back to the all-time high of $1,100 of late 2013. But the growth did not stop there.
In fact, from March onwards, an initial rally was triggered which, through ups and downs, brought the price of BTC close to $5,000 in September. But in October 2017, a new speculative bubble was triggered that was completely unsustainable and took the price of bitcoin to $20,000 in December.
Then the bubble burst, and the price by February 2018 was back to $6,000.
Therefore, also in 2017 there was an initial organic rally until September, followed by an unsustainable speculative bubble in the last three months of the year, very similar to the one in late 2013.
In 2020 there was the third halving of bitcoin, but this time even during the halving year there was a real rally that led the price to set new highs in December.
Indeed, at the beginning of 2021 the price went so far as to double the records of the previous cycle.
Why this time Bitcoin is not in a speculative bubble
The current rally, however, does not seem similar to the speculative bubbles of late 2013 or late 2017, but seems much more like the rallies that characterized the first nine months of these two years.
If history were to repeat itself this time too, not only would it be unlikely that the current rally was a speculative bubble, but that it might actually have yet to happen.
Thanks to the great speculative bubbles of the past, in 2013 the price multiplied by almost a hundred times in one year, while in 2017 it multiplied by about 20 times.
In 2021, the price has not even doubled since the end of 2020, so it is certainly not a speculative bubble like those of the past.
This does not detract from the fact that it could also be a mini-bubble, as they form all the time on the price of BTC, but nothing like what happened in late 2013 or late 2017.
