There is a website called 99bitcoins.com that has been tracking Bitcoin obituaries since 2010 — articles, op-eds, and social media posts declaring Bitcoin dead, finished, worthless, or doomed. As of 2025, the count was well over 400.
Bitcoin has survived every single one.
This isn’t a defense of Bitcoin or an argument that it will keep going up forever. It’s something more interesting: a pattern. Bitcoin has a remarkable track record of surviving the things that were supposed to kill it, often while the price was doing something completely different from what the obituary predicted.
A brief history of Bitcoin’s announced deaths
| Year | What they said | Price then | What happened next |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2010 | “The Bitcoin network is essentially useless.” — various forums | $0.06 | It became worth more than a dollar within months. |
| 2011 | “Bitcoin is in its death throes.” After crashing from $30 to $2. | $2 | It recovered and eventually surpassed $30 again. |
| 2013 | Multiple major media outlets declared it over after a crash from $260 to $50. | $50 | It hit $1,000 by year end. |
| 2014 | Mt. Gox collapsed. Hundreds of articles declared Bitcoin “finished.” | ~$400 | Bitcoin survived without Mt. Gox. The protocol was unaffected. |
| 2017 | “Bitcoin is a bubble.” “Bitcoin is a fraud.” “Bitcoin is a Ponzi scheme.” | ~$5,000 | It hit $19,000 before the end of the year. |
| 2018 | After the crash from $19K to $3K: near-universal declarations of death. | $3,200 | It eventually hit $69,000 in 2021. |
| 2022 | FTX collapsed. “Crypto is over.” “Bitcoin is going to zero.” | $16,000 | It crossed $100,000 in late 2024. |
Why do the obituaries keep being wrong?
Most Bitcoin obituaries are written at the bottom of a crash, when sentiment is at its worst and the near-term price trend appears to confirm everything the skeptics have been saying. They confuse “the price is down significantly” with “the underlying network is broken.”
The Bitcoin network has never once failed to produce a block on schedule. It has never been hacked at the protocol level. It has never stopped processing transactions. The crashes were price events, not network events. A volatile price is not the same as a broken protocol.
Every crash felt like the end. None of them were.
What actually could kill Bitcoin?
This is actually a useful question to ask honestly. The realistic threats are:
A catastrophic bug in the protocol — possible in theory, but Bitcoin has been running for 16 years under scrutiny from some of the world’s best cryptographers. No such bug has been found.
A coordinated global ban — governments could make it illegal to use or hold. Some have tried. China has banned it multiple times. The network continues to function.
A superior alternative — something that does everything Bitcoin does, better, in a way that captures its network effect. This is theoretically possible. It hasn’t happened in 16 years.
General loss of interest — if everyone just stopped caring and stopped using it. Possible. Also increasingly unlikely as adoption grows.
None of this means Bitcoin can’t go down — it can, and it has, and it will again. The point is simpler: the people who declared it dead were wrong. All 400+ of them. And understanding why they kept being wrong tells you something useful about what Bitcoin actually is.
Bitcoin is still here. So is OrangeTill.
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