Bitcoin's Obituaries: A $1,000 Investment Could Have Multiplied Millions

A platform called Bitcoin Deaths has been tracking declarations that bitcoin is dead since 2010. There have been 478 such statements, with 24 of them made this month alone.

The value of $1,000 invested at each of the most prominent moments a public figure or institution announced that bitcoin was finished has been calculated. The dates line up with real, checkable moments: June 20, 2011, when Tim Worstall published “So, That’s the End of Bitcoin Then” in Forbes after the price on Mt. Gox collapsed from $17 to pennies in minutes; July 11, 2019, when Donald Trump posted that he was not a fan of bitcoin and other Cryptocurrencies; November 30, 2022, when European Central Bank officials described the market as “an artificially induced last gasp before the road to irrelevance”; and more recently, when they put fair value at zero.

The results are striking. Had $1,000 been invested after each of these declarations, its value would be around $4,922,700 in 2011; $7,300 in 2019; $5,000 in 2022; and just $1,700 in the latest statement from the European Central Bank.