Bitcoin Obituaries: 477 Deaths and Counting

On 15 December 2010 a blog called The Underground Economist published a short post titled "Why Bitcoin can't be a currency". One bitcoin cost 23 cents. It is the first entry on the most widely quoted list in crypto: the Bitcoin Obituaries kept by the education site 99Bitcoins, which records every time a writer, banker or economist with an audience pronounced Bitcoin dead.

The list now says Bitcoin has died 477 times. On 16 October 2026 one bitcoin trades at about $82,000.

How the count works

99Bitcoins logs an obituary when a notable person or publication declares that Bitcoin is finished, worthless or heading to zero, and records the price on the day. Each entry is a headline, a source and a number, which makes the list read like a share price chart annotated with every analyst who said sell.

The early years were thin. The tracker has one entry for 2010, six for 2011 and one for 2012, when Wired put Bitcoin on its "Expired" list at $13.30. Forbes ran "So, That's the End of Bitcoin Then" on 20 June 2011, with Bitcoin at $15.15, after the Mt. Gox exchange, then the biggest place to trade it, was hacked. Reuters published "An early obituary for bitcoin" on 8 January 2014 at $821, and Bloomberg wrote that the "Mt. Gox Meltdown Spells Doom for Bitcoin" on 25 February 2014, the day the exchange went dark.

2017: the year of 124 funerals

The busiest year by far was 2017, with 124 obituaries, and they did not arrive at the bottom. They arrived at the top. As Bitcoin climbed from about $1,000 to nearly $20,000, the tracker logged 22 obituaries in November and 34 in December. The Wall Street Journal ran "Bitcoin's Wild Ride Shows The Truth: It Is Probably Worth Zero" on 18 September at $3,570. Jamie Dimon, the chief executive of JPMorgan Chase, called it a "fraud" that would eventually blow up on 12 September, at $4,367. The Nobel Prize winner Joseph Stiglitz said it "ought to be outlawed" in late November. Forbes ran "The Great Bitcoin Scam" on 28 December at $16,064.

The pattern matters. The writers of 2017 were right that the price was in a bubble: Bitcoin lost more than 80% over the next year. They were wrong about the death. 2018 added 92 more obituaries as the price fell, 27 of them in January alone. Warren Buffett's "probably rat poison squared" went on the list on 5 May 2018 at $9,671. The Economist wrote that "Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are useless" in August at $6,940.

The count then fell with each cycle: 40 in 2019, 14 in 2020, 46 in 2021, 27 in 2022, 8 in 2023 and 2 in 2024. The later entries came from institutions, not columnists. Two European Central Bank officials, Ulrich Bindseil and Jürgen Schaaf, published "Bitcoin's last stand" on the ECB blog on 30 November 2022, calling the price an "artificially induced last gasp before the road to irrelevance", at $17,169. After US regulators approved Bitcoin exchange-traded funds, stock-market funds that hold the coin for ordinary investors, the same two wrote in February 2024 that "Bitcoin has failed", at $51,305. Bitcoin passed $100,000 ten months later.

A year without a death, then 2026

The only 99Bitcoins entry for 2025 is not an obituary at all. On 22 August 2025, with Bitcoin at about $118,900, the site logged a note from the exchange Phemex that more than a year had passed without anyone notable declaring Bitcoin dead. Bitcoin set its record of $126,080 on 6 October 2025, according to CoinGecko.

Then it fell by more than half. By February 2026 it was below $70,000, and on 1 July 2026 it closed near $58,600. The obituary writers came back. As of 16 October 2026, 99Bitcoins had not added a new entry since August 2025, but a second tracker, Bitcoindeaths.com, credited to Jerry Feng, had logged 24 death notices in 2026 by 12 October and 478 since 2010 by its own count. Bitcoin.com, reporting its figures in August, put the 2026 tally at 21 at that point.

The 2026 list is a roll call of the slide. Michael Burry, the investor made famous by The Big Short, warned on 3 February that the fall could turn into a "death spiral" that bankrupts miners. Jemima Kelly of the Financial Times wrote on 8 February that Bitcoin was "still about $69,000 too high", at $69,282. The hedge fund manager George Noble posted that Bitcoin was "done" on 24 February. David Tait, the chief executive of the World Gold Council, said in May that Bitcoin was going to zero, calling it "just my instinct as a trader". The gold advocate Peter Schiff added several, including a June interview in which he said that for most investors it "will feel like zero".

What $100 per funeral would have bought

The list is an awkward record for the people on it, and a tempting one for anyone who wants to turn it into a trading rule. Using the prices 99Bitcoins records, $100 spent on bitcoin on the day of each of its obituaries, about $47,400 in all, would have bought roughly 588 bitcoin. At about $82,000, that is worth around $48 million. Most of it comes from the first entry: $100 at 23 cents bought about 435 bitcoin. Leave that one out and the rest still turn about $47,300 into roughly $12.6 million.

That arithmetic flatters the idea. Obituaries cluster at tops as much as at bottoms, and anyone who bought on the December 2017 obituaries waited up to three years to get their money back. The honest reading is narrower: for sixteen years, the people who said Bitcoin would go to zero have been wrong about the zero, even in the years when they were right about the fall.