Gold bulls, like Bitcoin bulls, tend to be an excitable bunch prone to wild extrapolation.

I say that realizing there’s something hilariously ironic about accusing Bitcoin proponents of being delusional. Bitcoin has, after all, delivered a percentage gain of unfathomable enormity over the life of history’s most successful speculative investment. Suffice to say when it comes to Bitcoin, the joke’s on skeptics. Still.

And really, the same applies to gold just not in equal measure, and not over such a compressed time frame. (Gold’s outperformed pretty much everything other than property over the long arc of human history, but it’s not up a hundred million percent in 15 years).

So, when I lampoon gold as an intrinsically valueless rock (or Bitcoin as an intrinsically valueless spreadsheet entry), it’s a statement of fact, not necessarily a pejorative assessment. Even if it were the latter, I can promise you gold’s feelings aren’t hurt, gold being a rock and such. The fact that gold and Bitcoin are both valueless valuables, as I’ve put it previously, doesn’t change the fact that owning them over long periods has accrued exponentially to speculators.

As a quick, but in my view obligatory, aside, it’s important to consider the distinct possibility that virtually no one who bought large sums of Bitcoin in the earliest days (i.e., in or around “inception”) actually exhibited so-called “diamond hands” all the way up to $125,000 per token. Similarly, I don’t know anyone who’s two thousand years old, and I doubt you do either, which means we’re going to have a hard time tracking down that person who reaped the exponential benefits of holding gold instead of sundry failed fiat currencies over the two millennia or so since the first gold coins were minted.

But you didn’t have to be a day-one “coiner” nor Methuselah to score big gains on Bitcoin and gold, the same as you needn’t have been the apocryphal visionary who “bought Amazon down 96% in 2001” to ride the Jeff Bezos train to a hefty gain. Maybe it’s too late to buy gold, but nothing says it “has to” stop at $4,000.

With that in mind, consider the table below, from BofA’s Michael Hartnett.

That’s the modern history of gold bull markets, along with contemporaneous returns for USTs, the dollar and US equities.

The implication (if you can call it that), is that the gold rally could have a ways to run yet to match the 293% average historical bull market return.

Of course, past performance is no guarantee of future results, and a lot could go wrong with that “thesis.” For example, so far the dollar’s nascent rebound hasn’t been a deterrent, but I can assure you it will be in the event the greenback comeback gathers any momentum. I could go on.

But when speculative assets get goin,’ they can be hard to arrest. Gold’s “too hot right now,” but virtually no one’s structurally long gold, BofA’s Michael Hartnett remarked, editorializing around the table.

“Front-running of a new Fed Chair, boom/bubble polices and asset gold revaluation à la 1934 and 1973 [all] favor the debasement trade,” Hartnett went on, noting that if you extrapolate from the average gain and duration witnessed during the last four bull markets, gold will peak around $6,000 next spring.