This is not "normal."
Of course, not being normal is part of bitcoin's appeal. Bitcoin has redefined money and created the hitherto non-existent concept of a scarce digital asset. It’s hard to hold it to the standards of "normal" assets.
But as someone who spent decades watching financial markets go through repeated patterns of exuberance and retrenchment, I’m quite uneasy with bitcoin’s latest runup. A 20% gain over the weekend left it up 60% over two weeks and up an eye-popping 900% year-to-date.
Record-breaking gains are irrelevant in isolation. The important question is "compared to what?" And the search for an apples-to-apples comparison is especially tricky for an asset class whose binary set of outcomes might lie in an all-or-nothing range of $0 to $1 million.