Have you checked out the price of bitcoin lately? The cryptocurrencys price is up about 40% this year, and inching closer to its pandemic-era record of nearly $69,000 per coin.

Some of the most devoted investors in bitcoin have a credo HODL basically short for hold on for dear life. Its a mantra to never sell your bitcoin, even when the price is in the dumps like it was for much of the past couple years.

Well those HODLers are rejoicing now.

Sean Longstreet started investing in bitcoin back in 2017, when it was around $17,000 per coin. The musician and artist has kept buying, through multiple crypto winters those periods when bitcoin crashed to disconcerting lows.

When things go down, you have to lie on your conviction, and theres a phrase, when theres blood on the streets you buy. So I did not sell, I just cried and held on to it, he said.

Longstreet wont tell me how much he owns in bitcoin thats a taboo question for bitcoiners but he says he does own more crypto than he does stock.

And while it may be tempting to tell skeptical friends and family I told you so, hes learned to resist that urge.

It causes too much strain if you try to onboard your family and something, something bad happens, he said.

The latest bitcoin surge is mostly due to the SECs approval of bitcoin exchange traded funds, or ETFs for short. ETFs allow big and small investors to put money into bitcoin, without having to touch a crypto wallet or actually understand the blockchain.

Ryan Rasmussen is a researcher at Bitwise Asset Management. More than a billion dollars have poured into their bitcoin ETF.

Now anyone can open their brokerage account, and with the click of a button allocate to bitcoin. This was kind of like bitcoins IPO moment, he said.

Pensions and hedge funds and mom-and-pop traders are saying, sure, Ill dip my toe in that bitcoin IPO, especially while the price goes up.

But Lee Reiners at the Duke Financial Economics Center said more mainstream financial actors getting in on crypto carries risk when the next bitcoin winter inevitably comes.

Now you sort of created a interstate freeway thats connecting the traditional financial system with the crypto economy, such that a problem in one could easily spill into the other, he said.

For his part, bitcoiner Sean Longstreet agrees another downturn will come at some point, but hes not planning on selling anytime soon.

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Latest crypto thaw has bitcoiners rejoicing - Marketplace