Paul Krugman: 'Bitcoin Is Evil'

The Nobel laureate who said the Internet would be no bigger than the fax machine. Then said Bitcoin was evil. Both predictions aged terribly.

In December 2013, Paul Krugman wrote a New York Times column titled "Bitcoin Is Evil." His argument: Bitcoin had no tether to reality, no backing by any government, and was primarily useful for illegal transactions. He called it a bubble driven by libertarian fantasies. Bitcoin was at $800.

This was not Krugman's first catastrophically wrong technology prediction. In 1998, he wrote that "by 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet's impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine's." That quote aged so badly it became a meme. The man missed the Internet. Then he missed Bitcoin. The pattern is hard to ignore.

Krugman continued to attack Bitcoin for the next decade. In 2018, he called crypto "a more obvious bubble than housing was." Bitcoin was at $6,000 when he said that. It hit $69,000 three years later. He predicted it would go to zero multiple times. He said crypto had "no clear use case." Each prediction was followed by Bitcoin climbing to a new all-time high.

To his credit, Krugman is a legitimate economist who won the Nobel Prize for trade theory. His analysis of traditional economics is respected. His work on currency crises is genuinely important. But his track record on technology is among the worst of any public intellectual alive. The fax machine quote and the Bitcoin predictions form a pattern: deep understanding of 20th-century economics, zero intuition for 21st-century technology.

Krugman has quietly stopped writing about Bitcoin as frequently. The Times columns moved on to other topics. Bitcoin did not. It passed $100,000 in late 2024. Krugman's "Bitcoin Is Evil" column remains his most-shared article - not because people agree with it, but because they find it funny.