The current frenzy surrounding bitcoin feels familiar to billionaire entrepreneur Steve Case.
Case lived the dot-com boom: He launched AOL in 1985, took it public in 1992 and merged the company with Time Warner in 2000 (the deal closed in 2001). Case delivered a 11,616% return to shareholders, according to his bio on the website of his investment company, Revolution.
And he says what's gone on with bitcoin recently — the cryptocurrency has gone from trading at $1,000 in February to over $19,000 earlier in December (it's currently trading a bit over $16,000), according to industry site CoinDesk — is similar to what happened when online technologies started to emerge in the 90s.
"The boom and mania around Bitcoin in recent months reminds me a little of the Dot Com boom and mania 20 years ago," Case tells Fortune's Term Sheet, published Wednesday.
Case doesn't specify whether the bitcoin market as a whole will boom or bust, but says "there will be some winners and losers, and we'll need to separate the core technologies from some of the current implementations."
Case in point: The tech titan is optimistic about the underlying technology that supports bitcoin, a digital ledger called blockchain.