Whether or not bitcoin is in a bubble, the cryptocurrency's performance "dwarfs" nearly all bubbles, including the 1929 stock market crash, investor Ken Fisher told CNBC on Wednesday.
Bitcoin, which has surged more than 1,500 percent this year, has many market participants warning of a bubble.
Fisher suggested looking at the peak of prior bubbles with that of the popular digital currency.
"If you look at bitcoin coming up to this point today and overlay it with the peak, it dwarfs all those other bubbles," the executive chairman and co-chief investment officer of Fisher Investments said. "Gold a couple of times, 1929. Nineteen-ninety with the Nikkei, 2000 with the Nasdaq. You can just go down the list: boom, boom, boom, boom, boom."
"This one in magnitude, whether it's a bubble or not, the price move around that dwarfs every bubble that's ever occurred," Fisher added in an interview on "Squawk Box."
Birinyi Associates studied bitcoin versus 10 large financial bubbles. If the cryptocurrency is a bubble, it's already larger than the Nasdaq in the 1990s, the Dow in the 1920s and silver in the 1970s, the study showed.
Bitcoin futures, trading under the ticker symbol XBT, debuted Sunday night on the Cboe. The futures price climbed 10 percent in the first two hours and triggered at least two trading halts due to rapid price gains. The new futures were slightly higher on Wednesday.
Critics, including JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, have doubted the legitimacy of bitcoin. Proponents argue bitcoin is a good medium of exchange and a way to store value like gold.
—CNBC's Patti Domm contributed to this report.