The long-running habit of comparing Bitcoin to the 17th-century tulip craze has resurfaced again in recent market commentary — and Bloomberg’s senior ETF analyst Eric Balchunas has had enough.
In a new social media post, Balchunas argued that anyone still using the analogy is ignoring centuries of financial context and Bitcoin’s proven durability.
Key Takeaways
Balchunas says Bitcoin’s repeated recoveries make the tulip-mania analogy historically impossible.
He views the 2025 correction as a normal cool-down after a strong prior year.
The analyst argues that comparing Bitcoin to tulips ignores how non-productive stores of value like gold and art are treated.
Analyst Says Bitcoin’s Survival Alone Makes Tulip Analogy Impossible
Balchunas noted that the famous tulip bubble lasted only a few years and collapsed permanently, never recovering. Bitcoin, by contrast, has gone through more than a dozen market cycles over 17 years, repeatedly suffering deep drawdowns only to return to new all-time highs. According to him, that ability to rebound after “six or seven brutal hits” invalidates the tulip comparison more effectively than any technical argument.
The analyst added that over the past three years Bitcoin remains up more than 250%, including a 122% surge last year — gains he says are fundamentally incompatible with “one-time mania” behavior.
Critics Motivated by Emotion, Not Analysis, Balchunas Suggests
Balchunas also argued that the persistence of the tulip metaphor has little to do with economics and more to do with sentiment. In his view, many outspoken critics simply dislike Bitcoin and reach for the most dramatic analogy available to provoke supporters rather than engage with data.
Instead of viewing Bitcoin’s 2025 correction as evidence of bubble dynamics, Balchunas characterized it as a standard comedown after an unusually powerful previous year. He pointed out that even traditional equities experience similar cooling periods and that dramatic overinterpretation of normal volatility is one of the most common mistakes in crypto reporting.
“Non-Productive Asset” Argument Doesn’t Hold Up Either
Another frequent criticism — that Bitcoin is unproductive and therefore speculative like tulips — was dismissed by Balchunas as equally flawed. He highlighted that many widely respected stores of value, including gold, art, rare collectibles and stamps, produce no yield yet maintain global demand and legitimacy.
“Are we calling gold or a Picasso tulips?” he asked, arguing that Bitcoin belongs in the same category of scarce, non-yielding assets that markets have recognized for centuries.
Bitcoin’s Multi-Cycle History Shows It’s No One-Off Bubble
Balchunas concluded by stressing that tulip mania was a short-lived historical anomaly, whereas Bitcoin has grown into a global, institutional asset with clear cyclical patterns and increasing adoption. A bubble that bursts once and never returns, he said, simply cannot be compared to an asset that has survived nearly two decades of crashes, recoveries and expansion.
