Bitcoin has been declared dead or dying about 390 times since 2010. But this year it is dying much less often.
In 2020, bitcoin was reported dead or dying only 11 times, according to a list of these fake obituaries maintained by a Singapore-based website called 99 Bitcoins.
Bitcoin’s annual “obituary” count has not been so low since 2012, three years after the launch of bitcoin. The team behind the site confirmed to CoinDesk that the list is actively maintained to date.
The sharp drop in obituaries correlates with the record price of bitcoin this year, after breaking its 2017 historical record in November, with a year-to-date total gain of more than 270%.
In the past, it was “fashionable to publicly reject or even embarrass those who believed in the bitcoin value proposition,” said Kevin Kelly, Delphi Digital’s global macro strategy leader and former Bloomberg stock analyst, in a direct message with CoinDesk.
But now the game has changed.
“Mass retail speculation and viral memes have been exchanged for family offices and world-class macro investors,” said Kelly.
Bitcoin’s rapidly growing institutional buyer pool includes giants MassMutual and Guggenheim. And its considerable investments – combined with signs of revived interest in retail – make it increasingly difficult to announce the death of the thermometer cryptocurrency.
In a December bitcoin report, Kelly’s research team wrote: “Institutional investors have not only generated net profit since September, but also the magnitude of their net exposure, measured in BTC, has increased from previous periods.”
Interestingly, the authors of insincere bitcoin “obituaries” ignored the two moments when the network actually “died”, according to Pierre Rochard, Kraken’s chief bitcoin strategist.
In 2010, an inflation bug allowed anyone using the network to create an infinite amount of bitcoins, which, for many intentions and purposes, caused the network to die, Rochard said. In 2013, bitcoin “died” for the second time when a failed version of its source code caused an unexpected increase in the block size limit.
“In both cases, bitcoin was promptly resurrected by the collective will of its users,” said Rochard. To save the network, bitcoin nodes reverted to an older version of the software in 2013 and rewound the blockchain back to a point before the inflation bug in 2010.
“Few critics understand what happened when bitcoin actually died, twice,” Rochard told CoinDesk via email.
After these incidents, bitcoin’s “robust” fundamentals and “fast adoption” created market conditions with several “parabolic revaluations,” Rochard said, increasing both its adoption and the attention given to its technical strength, leaving skeptics with little space. to continue the death pronouncements.
As bitcoin lives, “the career risk is no longer embracing bitcoin,” according to Kelly. “It is for not giving [bitcoin] the time and respect he deserves. “