# Are crypto assets a bubble?
**Crypto assets are a bubble.**

Crypto assets have the characterstic price behaviour that resembles many other [bubbles](../concepts/bubble.md) and [market manias](../concepts/madness-crowds.md) throughout history.  Bitcoin has been characterised as a [speculative](../concepts/speculation.md) bubble by eight winners of the Nobel Prize in economics.

* Paul Krugman
* Robert J. Shiller
* Joseph Stiglitz
* Richard Thaler
* James Heckman
* Thomas Sargent
* Angus Deaton
* Oliver Hart

And by central bank officials:

* Alan Greenspan
* Agustín Carstens
* Vítor Constâncio
* Nout Wellink
* Mark Carney

And several notable investors have also described it as a bubble:

* Warren Buffet
* George Soros

## References
1. Chancellor, Edward. 1999. ‘Devil Take the Hindmost: A History of Financial Speculation’.
1. Blanchard, Olivier J, and Mark W Watson. 1982. ‘Bubbles, Rational Expectations and Financial Markets’. NBER Working Paper, no. w0945.
1. Bernstein, William J. 2021. The Delusions of Crowds: Why People Go Mad in Groups. Grove Press.
1. Demmler, Michael, and Amilcar Orlian Fernández Domínguez. 2021. ‘Bitcoin and the South Sea Company: A Comparative Analysis’. Revista Finanzas y Política Económica 13 (1): 197–224.
1. Baur, Dirk G., and Thomas Dimpfl. 2021. ‘The Volatility of Bitcoin and Its Role as a Medium of Exchange and a Store of Value’. Empirical Economics 61 (5): 2663–83. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00181-020-01990-5.
1. Caferra, Rocco, Gabriele Tedeschi, and Andrea Morone. 2021. ‘Bitcoin: Bubble That Bursts or Gold That Glitters?’ Economics Letters 205: 109942. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.econlet.2021.109942.
1. Mackay, Charles. 2012. Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. Simon and Schuster.
1. Nabilou, Hossein, and André Prüm. 2019. ‘Ignorance, Debt, and Cryptocurrencies: The Old and the New in the Law and Economics of Concurrent Currencies’. Journal of Financial Regulation 5 (1): 29–63. https://doi.org/10.1093/jfr/fjz002.
1. Smales, L. A. 2022. ‘Investor Attention in Cryptocurrency Markets’. International Review of Financial Analysis 79: 101972. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.irfa.2021.101972.
1. Kolchinski, Alex. 2022. ‘Crypto Is an Unproductive Bubble’. Alex Kolchinski (blog). 18 March 2022. https://alexkolchinski.com/2022/03/18/crypto-is-an-unproductive-bubble/.
1. Krugman, Paul. 2021. ‘The Brutal Truth About Bitcoin’. The New York Times 21.
