Honest question, please answer to the best of your knowledge OP:

With which volume was this amway thing (never heard of it, probably an American thing) trading at its peak?

Bitcoin is in the ballpark of 6B USD yearly. That's well below the trading volume the stock of a multinational company sees, but a figure that should give you an impression that a lot of the comparisons that are thrown around here probably don't fit.

So maybe Amway was in that range as well, would be interesting to hear that from you OP. But my point is this: I'm not saying that Bitcoin will succeed for sure. But it already reached a size that makes it difficult to compare to pretty much any phenomenon I know about... not even the often refered to Dutch tulip mania qualifies, because that was (to my knowledge) in the end restricted to the national market of the NL, not a global phenomenon.

In other words, even if Bitcoin fails, it will create its *own* point of reference... nothing in the history of finance accurately compares to it.