Excerpted and revised from Jake Weber’s original article, with permission.

Many financial pundits and crypto advocates have scrambled

to argue whether Bitcoin (BITCOMP) is a bubble or not. As the financial community takes sides, I have dug into Bitcoin’s tremendous run using nothing but hard data to see whether it’s in bubble territory or not. Below is what I found as illustrated in 4 charts.

Bitcoin’s Performance Dwarfs Tech Stocks’ Run in the 90s, but This Bubble Is Nowhere Near the Dot-Com Mania

The Bitcoin run has drawn comparisons to the dot-com bubble of the late 1990s. While the sentiment and underlying forces of both bubbles may be similar, their performance is a different story.

Chart #1

At the beginning of 2015, Bitcoin was trading just above $300. In early November this year, the Bitcoin price topped $7,600. That translates to returns north of 2,200% in a matter of 1,041 trading days. By comparison, the NASDAQ index was up 391% after 1,041 trading days from the start of 1995. Returns on the NASDAQ index peaked just shy of 1,100% after 1,326 trading days.

Bitcoin’s run has far outpaced the tech bubble, and its returns have already dwarfed dot-com mania. Now, crypto advocates argue that Bitcoin has transformative fundamentals so the returns are justified. I don’t deny that blockchain is a transformative technology that will eventually revolutionize the finance industry but…the widespread adoption of any transformative technology has ups and downs and takes way more time than people think. These things don’t happen overnight.

…During the dot-com crash, the NASDAQ composite lost 78% of its value, wiping out trillions of dollars between March 2000 and October 2002. With a total market cap near $200 billion, cryptocurrencies are nowhere near the dot-com stocks of the late 1990s. This means that it won’t take a whole lot of new capital to push Bitcoin even higher but, until Bitcoin matures, its price appreciation is only speculation.