Silence of the Naysayers

There’s a lot of gloating going on in the bitcoin community, with reminders of famous (and embarrassing) predictions that it would go to zero.

Crypto commentator Dan Held couldn’t resist retweeting a 2019 prediction from fund manager Peter Schiff that bitcoin is never going to hit $100,000:

Dan Held tweeted: One thing you can count on in this world is the Bitcoin naysayers being proven wrong!

There’s too many of them to recount here, but here’s a sampling:

Kenneth Rogoff, a Harvard University professor and economist, told CNBC in 2019 that bitcoin would more likely go to $100 than $100,000 in the next 10 years. He said this when BTC was valued at $10,900.

Rogoff, who was also a former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund, said bitcoin lacked any popular usage. "Basically, if you take away the possibility of money laundering and tax evasion, its actual uses as a transaction vehicle are very small," said the doltish economist.

Warren Buffet, doyen of the investor aristocracy, boldly predicted that BTC would go to zero and that he wouldn’t pay $25 for all the supply of it. That was just a few years ago.

There were others who were closer to the mark:

Billionaire Tim Draper, who made billions from his 2014 purchase of almost 30,000 BTC at $18 million, has a prediction of his own: that the US dollar will collapse by 2030, eventually going the way of the now-defunct Confederate dollar due to massive US debt.

Expect the gloating to continue while BTC sniffs the $100k mark.