That's the thing about competition... There are many options... There is no monopoly or cartels... The opposite of your beloved government...
It seems indeed like a bubble or a better term for it Punzi Scheme. The first who were there make most of the money. It is the same in any city, any industry. Soon or later the illusion will vanish, people will suffer from their own greed, until most of things will become back to normal.
Kids are betting their pocket money............ It is creating a new social revolution. Criminals are loving it. The rush to mine " nothing " may break the electricity grids and create more extra pollution than the US That's people for ya About time the politicians squashed it.
It is perfectly ok to have mania. What is totally unacceptable is not to profit massively from the mania. Similarly it is perfectly OK to have huge bubble burst. What is totally unacceptable is not to profit massively from bubble burst. It is OK to miss profiting from the mania. You have one more last last chance. Market is always kind enough to give us second chance. Better don't miss profiting from the bubble burst. Because if you miss, then it is seriously really no hope.
Even after the soviet block colapsed, governments and politicians of countries that were part of it, prohibited the US dollar... That didn't work out at all for them... Today, cryptos are taking the place of the dollar at that time in an analogous situation... You communists, government-adoring people, are in for a big surprise... If there is demand, there will be offer... Every single time politicians and governments try to forbid or regulate something, it doesn't work out and it usually has the opposite effect... History is crystal clear on that. No reason for that to change... Bitcoin may be a bubble, maybe not... It may loose a lot of it's current value in the short run... It may even collapse and cease to exist... Or it may keep going higher and higher... None of this is relevant... There will always be other cryptos... And there is nothing that politicians can EFFECTIVELY do to stop it... They will try, for sure... But a private person's ingenuity will always be smarter then dumb government officials, because the former has the incentive to inovate and get better, the latter has the incentive to keep being stupid... That, in the long run, will always prevail...