Why They Keep Getting It Wrong
The pattern is not accidental. Every time Bitcoin experiences a significant correction, the same voices emerge with the same conclusions. The crash proves it was a bubble. The adoption is fake. The technology is useless. The only people who buy it are criminals and gamblers. And then Bitcoin recovers, makes new all-time highs, and the cycle begins again.
What these obituaries miss is a fundamental misunderstanding of what Bitcoin is. Journalists trained to cover the stock market look at Bitcoin volatility and see fragility. Economists trained in Keynesian frameworks look at Bitcoin's fixed supply and see irrationality. Bankers look at decentralization and see threat. None of them are looking at Bitcoin on its own terms.
"The press is the enemy of Bitcoin in the same way the press was the enemy of the internet."
— Attributed to early internet observer, adapted for Bitcoin
The 99bitcoins.com Bitcoin obituaries tracker — which has been documenting every Bitcoin death declaration since 2010 — passed 400 entries in 2022. Each entry is a public record. Each has a date, an author, a publication, and a price. The price never went to zero. The author was always wrong. The publication moved on to the next controversy without ever acknowledging the error.
The more interesting question is not why they get it wrong — it is why they keep making the same prediction. The answer is simple: there is almost no career cost to being wrong about Bitcoin. A journalist who declares Bitcoin dead in 2018 and is later shown to be wrong simply writes about something else. No correction. No accountability. No update. Meanwhile, the person who bought Bitcoin at $3,500 in November 2018 is sitting on life-changing returns.
The graveyard above is not comprehensive. It is a curated sample. For every obituary shown here, there are twenty more like it. The real question — the one that matters — is why you would take investment advice from the same institutions that have been wrong about this specific asset for fifteen consecutive years.