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Bitcoin has had a tumultuous ride ever since its inception on Jan 3, 2009. The token is an extremely volatile asset class that has been ridiculed by numerous skeptics. Dr Doom economist Nouriel Roubini recently said the “Flintstones had a better monetary system” than bitcoin and that it shouldn’t be considered a currency.
Harvard professor Kenneth Rogoff has said he doesn’t see bitcoin succeeding and that it “could have some use in a dystopian future.”
‘Shark Tank’ star Kevin O’Leary previously called bitcoin “garbage.” He recently changed his mind, saying he’s planning to allocate 3% of his portfolio to the world’s most popular cryptocurrency.
At the time of writing, bitcoin has been declared “dead” in mainstream media 402 times. Despite the scores of times various personalities and publications have pronounced it dead, the asset continues to rise in value and get adopted by major Wall Street institutions.
Bitcoin’s “death” can be tracked at Bitcoin Obituary, a parody website that collates news articles and blogs. It has already been declared dead nine times this year and 14 times in 2020. But the highest number of “deaths” it recorded (124) was in 2017, when its market cap hit $100 billion for the first time.
The token’s most recent death was announced on February 24, 2021 by Steve Hanke, an American applied economist at Johns Hopkins University, who said it’s only a matter of time before bitcoin “death spirals” to its intrinsic value which is $0.
Its earliest death was recorded on December 15, 2020 – almost two years since its creation – by a blogger called “The Underground Economist,” who predicted bitcoin would either remain a novelty forever or it would be “dead faster than you can blink.”
The price of bitcoin slipped on Friday by 0.4%, to $48,155, but is up 70% year-to-date.
