Imagine predicting Bitcoin’s death on a website that no longer exists.
That’s what blogger Sean Lynch did 13 years ago today, when he wrote what 99 Bitcoins now classifies as the world’s first “Bitcoin obituary,” a news article that predicted the cryptocurrency’s death or demise.
The post, titled “Why Bitcoin can’t be a currency,” argued that Bitcoin lacked the mechanisms to handle fluctuations in demand, which would lead it to become worthless over time. He wrote:
“In nature, positive feedback loops like exist with Bitcoin are lethal; the only thing that’s even kept Bitcoin alive this long is its novelty. Either it will remain a novelty forever or it will transition from novelty status to dead faster than you can blink.”
Since then, Bitcoin, the world’s most famous cryptocurrency, has defied critics and naysayers like Lynch, surging an astonishing 15 million percent in value since. Indeed, Bitcoin has consistently defied the odds, transforming from a niche experiment into a global financial phenomenon.
Still, the post, unearthed today by Bitcoin Historian Pete Rizzo is notable for proving just how wrong Bitcoin critics can be, with Lynch specifically arguing that economies need intervention and that Bitcoin would fail because it lacked it.
“The reason this can’t happen with government currencies is that government currencies *are* backed,” he wrote. “They’re backed by bullets. If demand for USD starts to fall faster than the USG would like, the USG can just raise taxes without increasing spending, increasing demand and reducing supply simultaneously. There’s a bunch of stuff the FED can do, of course, and the FED tends to act first, but its operations are harder to explain. This is obviously not a perfect mechanism, since bubbles are still blown and popped, but even this mechanism is not available with Bitcoin.”
Today, more and more people are seeing just how destructive that intervention can be, with central banks struggling to contain inflation around the globe.