Wall Street Was Wrong! Bitcoin Refuses to Die

TL;DR

Bitcoin has survived 477 death predictions because critics consistently used stock-valuation frameworks on a monetary asset, though real threats like quantum computing and government bans remain.

Key Points

• 1.Famous critics were wrong for 15 years because they measured Bitcoin with the wrong tools. Krugman, Buffett, Jamie Dimon, and Peter Schiff all applied stock or currency frameworks to Bitcoin, missing that it functions as a government-independent store of value, not a payment system — like gold, which also produces no cash flows yet has held value for 5,000 years.
• 2.Bitcoin Obituaries has tracked 477 separate declarations of Bitcoin's death since 2010. Despite each prediction coming from credible economists, investors, or media, the asset grew from $0.07 in 2010 to an all-time high of over $126,000 in 2025, making it the worst-performing major financial prediction in recorded history.
• 3.The Ponzi scheme argument from Peter Schiff and Ben McKenzie fails by definition. A Ponzi requires a central operator promising specific returns; Bitcoin has none — and the same logic applied consistently would label gold, real estate, and fine art as Ponzi schemes since they also appreciate through adoption rather than contractual income.
• 4.The real long-term risks critics never identified are coordinated government bans, a weakening miner security budget, and quantum computing. South Africa's 2026 draft regulations could force private key disclosure with 5-year jail terms; miner transaction fees fell below 1% of revenue in late April; and a March 2026 Google paper estimates breaking Bitcoin's elliptic curve cryptography may require under 500,000 physical qubits — 20x fewer than prior estimates.
• 5.Roughly 25% of all Bitcoin is already vulnerable to a sufficiently powerful quantum computer due to exposed public keys. BIP 360, added in February 2026, proposes a quantum-resistant upgrade, but moving coins linked to Satoshi's estimated 1.1 million BTC and forcing old-school holders to migrate remains politically unresolved.