Every few years, when Bitcoin gets loud again, the old analogy returns: tulip mania. In December 2025, investor Michael Burry went back to that frame, calling Bitcoin the “tulip bulb of our time” and arguing it’s “not worth anything,” while also saying crypto has helped criminal activity move underground.
It’s a sharp line. It also lands well on social media. But it compresses a complicated thing into a simple insult. To judge whether “tulip” fits, we should ask one basic question:
Is Bitcoin only a price story, or is it a working system that people keep using even when the hype fades?
Tulips were a collectible. Bitcoin is infrastructure.
Tulip mania was a rush into an item whose main value was fashion and scarcity within a small market. When the mood broke, there was no global network underneath it, no “tulip rails” that kept running.
Bitcoin is different because it is not just an object. It is a protocol: a set of rules that lets strangers transfer value without asking permission from a bank, company, or government. That is why people argue about it like a technology and a form of money, not like a rare flower.
And unlike a short-lived craze, Bitcoin has survived repeated “bubble → crash → obituary → comeback” cycles for more than a decade.
The network kept getting harder to kill.
If something is pure mania, you expect the underlying system to weaken over time. Bitcoin’s security trend has generally moved the other way.
Mining data and industry reporting show large growth in the computing power and industrial activity around Bitcoin over long periods, including major expansion in mining operations since the early days. And core network metrics like mining difficulty have been pushing record highs into late 2025, which means the system is harder and more expensive to attack than before.
You can dislike Bitcoin and still admit this: it is not “a thing people forgot.” It is a machine that keeps getting stress-tested.
Scarcity is not a marketing slogan here.
A big part of the tulip comparison is “people pay a lot for something that can’t justify the price.” Bitcoin’s strongest counter-argument is that it has an enforced monetary policy that does not react to politics.
Bitcoin has a hard cap: the supply is designed to max out at 21 million coins. That matters because most modern money systems are flexible by design; supply expands and contracts based on policy choices. Bitcoin is the opposite: its rule set is boring and predictable.
Also, new supply slows over time. The 2024 halving is one example of how issuance gets cut on schedule. You can debate whether scarcity alone makes a good asset, but you can’t say Bitcoin has “no fundamentals.” Its fundamental is rule-based supply.
“Not worth anything” depends on what you think money is.
A common skeptic view is: “It’s not backed by cashflows, so it’s worthless.” But money itself typically doesn’t have cashflows. It has properties: acceptability, portability, durability, divisibility, scarcity, and trust.
Bitcoin’s pitch is basically:
- portability (you can move it across borders),
- settlement without permission (no central gatekeeper),
- scarcity (rule-based supply),
- and censorship resistance (harder to block than normal payments).
Even if you think Bitcoin is overpriced, these are real features that some people will pay for, especially in places where banking access is limited, payments are censored, or currency trust is weak.
The crime argument is real, but incomplete.
Burry’s other point is that crypto enables crime. Crime does exist in crypto. That’s true. But two things are also true at the same time:
- Blockchain trails are permanent. That public record can help investigations and seizures.
- Law enforcement actively tracks on-chain funds in major cases, including state-linked hacking activity.
Also, when you look at illicit usage across crypto, Bitcoin is not always the main highway criminals choose, other networks and stablecoin rails often dominate because they can be cheaper and easier to move around.
So the honest version is: crypto can be used for crime, but it is also unusually traceable, and the “crime utility” story does not reduce Bitcoin to “just crime.”
Volatility doesn’t prove it’s a tulip. It proves it’s still being priced.
Bitcoin is volatile. That’s not a secret. But volatility is also what you get when a global market tries to price something that sits between tech and money, something new, liquid, and constantly debated.
Tulip mania ended when belief ended. Bitcoin’s belief changes, but the network keeps running, mining keeps competing, developers keep building, and users keep moving value. That doesn’t guarantee future returns, but it’s a very different shape than a one-season collectible bubble.
This article is for information only and is not investment advice. Always do your own research and manage risk carefully. If you want more guides on markets, wallets, and trading basics, explore the education content on blog.millionero.com. When you’re ready, you can trade Spot and Futures on Millionero based on your own plan.