Bitcoin Obituaries

A Bitcoin obituary is a published claim, by someone with a platform, that Bitcoin is dead, worthless, or about to fail. The site 99Bitcoins has kept a dated list of them since the beginning, with a link to each. The first entry is a blog post arguing that Bitcoin could never be a currency, published in November 2010, when one traded for about 22 cents. 99Bitcoins dates it 15 December 2010, the day of the archived copy it links, and by June 2011 its author had added an update walking the argument back. By September 2026 the list had 477 entries. It has not grown since April 2024, when 99Bitcoins stopped adding to it; other trackers kept counting.

The shape of the list is more interesting than the number. Obituaries track the price: they pile up around each top, as bubble calls, and keep coming through the crash that follows. The peak was 2017, with 124 entries, 113 of them in the run-up to the December top, followed by 94 in 2018 as the price fell 84 percent. Searches for "is bitcoin dead" run the other way and spike in crash weeks, when the writers have mostly moved on. The bear market entry describes the same cycle from the price side.

A few of the entries are worth reading rather than counting. Tim Worstall's Forbes piece from June 2011, "So, That's the End of Bitcoin Then," was written after the first Mt. Gox hack crashed the price from $17 to one cent for a few minutes. Wired's "The Rise and Fall of Bitcoin" in November 2011 is a good piece of reporting on the early community, written at $2 after the fall from $32, and it reads as a post-mortem. Paul Krugman's "Bitcoin Is Evil" in December 2013, which 99Bitcoins never listed but other trackers do, is an economist's argument that it cannot work as money, published a few weeks after the first run past $1,000. And Mike Hearn's "The resolution of the Bitcoin experiment," January 2016, is the one that stung, because Hearn had been a core developer for five years: he announced he had sold his coins and that the project had failed, at about $430, over the block size fight that would take two more years to settle.

None of those four is stupid, which is the thing to notice. Each one identified a real problem, an exchange that could be hacked, a price that could fall 90 percent, a monetary theory that had no place for it, a governance fight with no resolution mechanism. What each one got wrong was treating the problem as fatal. The exchange was replaced, the price recovered, the theory was argued with rather than obeyed, and the fight was settled by the UASF. The obituaries are a record of how many serious people mistook a problem for a death.

The list has limits, and honest use of it admits them. 99Bitcoins' stated rule is that a piece must say plainly that Bitcoin is or will be worthless, but the list does not always follow it: about one headline in ten is a question or a "could", and a few entries are weak. It also only runs one direction. Nobody keeps the list of Bitcoiners who declared the dollar, or gold, or every altcoin, dead on a date, and that list would be long too. What the obituaries prove is narrow: that one specific confident claim has failed every time it appears on the list, 477 times so far. That is not the same as proving it can never be right. It is a reason to ask the next person for their argument rather than their headline, which is what the FUD entry recommends for the rest of the genre.

Go deeper in Rat Poison, Tulips and a Pet Rock: every label critics put on Bitcoin, sorted by what would prove it wrong, with what happened next, the critics who were right, and what our own side got wrong.