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 from 15 December 2010, an essay arguing that Bitcoin could never be a currency, written when one traded for about 23 cents. By September 2026 the list had 477 entries.

The shape of the list is more interesting than the number. Obituaries follow price with a lag: they thin out during the run-up and pile up in the year after each top, when the writer has a chart to point at. The peak was 2017, with more than 120 entries as the price went vertical and every columnist filed a bubble piece, followed by more than 90 in 2018 as it fell 84 percent and every one of them filed a told-you-so. 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 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 includes anything that reads as a death sentence, so a hedged prediction and a headline the writer did not choose both count as entries, and a few 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 a specific confident claim has been wrong 477 times in a row. 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.