Wall Street Was Wrong! Bitcoin Refuses to Die

Added: 2026-05-07

[00:00:00]Bitcoin is going to zero. You've heard this scary  prediction for 15 years repeated confidently by some of the smartest people around. Paul Krugman,  a famous economist, said it in the New York Times back in 2013. Warren Buffett, the legendary  investor, called it rat poison squared in 2018. Jaime Diamond, the CEO of JP Morgan, called  it a fraud in 2017. Another well-known economist, Nuriel Rubini, called it the mother of all scams.  Then there's my personal favorite, Peter Schiff.

[00:00:34]He's been predicting Bitcoin's end since 2011.  And more recently, actor Ben McKenzie released a book in 2023 and produced a documentary in 2025,  calling it the biggest pyramid scheme ever. Every one of these predictions has been wrong about  the price, wrong about Bitcoin surviving, and of course, they were wrong about people actually  using it. But here's what most people in the crypto world won't admit. Some of these critics  weren't entirely wrong. Some of their arguments deserve a serious look. And one version of the  pessimistic case, which barely anyone dares to mention, could actually still happen. My name is  DC and you're watching the Coin Bureau. A website called Bitcoin Aubicaries has been keeping track  of every public statement declaring Bitcoin dead since 2010. The count is now up to 477 separate  funerals. Each prediction came from an expert, a major news source, a respected economist, or  a famous investor. And each one has been wrong, costing people money who listened. While the asset  itself has grown from about 7 cents in 2010 to roughly $80,000 today with an all-time high of  over $126,000 in 2025. Now, the attacks come in waves. The first set of putdowns happened between  2010 and 2013 when Bitcoin was only interesting to tech people and libertarians. The second  wave hit right after the Mount Gox exchange collapsed in 2014 when about 850,000 PTC vanished  and everyone agreed the experiment was over. Then the third wave came in 2018 after the frenzy  over ICOs ended and prices crashed from almost $20,000 to around 3,200. The fourth wave arrived  in 2022 after major companies like Terra, Celsius, and FTX collapsed in one year. And it seems as if  we are experiencing another wave just now. Simply put, this prediction that Bitcoin will fail is  the longest running major financial guess in the modern world. And it has the absolute worst  track record of any prediction in any market ever recorded. Now, the interesting question is not if  the critics were wrong. The price proves that. The interesting question is why they were wrong.  because most of them are arguably very smart people using financial rules that worked well  for every other type of asset in history. And this brings us to the first serious criticism, the  economist's view. This was led by Paul Krugman's 2013 article calling Bitcoin a bubble. This view  was backed up by many academics who argued Bitcoin had no real value, couldn't work as a form of  payment because its price was too volatile, and could never handle the volume of a real  payment system. You might think that argument was just wrong on the facts. But that misses  the point. Krugman was right that Bitcoin is bad for buying coffee every day. In fact, it's  terrible for buying coffee every day. And he was right that its basic speed can compare with Visa.  What he got wrong was the category. Bitcoin's real use ended up being totally different from what  currency experts were comparing it to. It became a store of value that no government controls and a  global system for settling large amounts of money, not a daily spending tool. The idea wasn't wrong.  The tool used to measure it was. The same mistake appeared in the second wave of criticism from  the value investing world where people like Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger argued that  an asset that doesn't produce any income can't be worth anything in the long run. Ma went even  further calling the whole thing stupid and evil.

[00:04:19]The truth is that the method of valuing an asset  based on its future cash flows works perfectly for company stocks but it totally fails for monetary  assets. Gold, for example, produces no cash flows at all. Yet, it has been considered money for  about 5,000 years. Bitcoin is the digital version of that same idea of a monetary premium, and if  you apply the rules for valuing stocks to it, you will always conclude it's worthless. The  mistake was the framework, not the conclusion that followed from it. Before we move on, the speed of  this story is why the Coinb Telegram channel is so important. This is where we share the latest  breaking news, provide deep dive alpha, and give you the most important market updates straight to  your phone. It's completely free to join. The link is in the description below, or you can scan the  QR code currently displayed on your screen. It's genuinely worth it. Okay, right back to it. The  third wave, the fraud idea, was pushed hardest by Jamie Diamond and Nuriel Rubini. Diamond called  Bitcoin a fraud in 2017 and famously said any of his traders caught using it would be fired. Rubini  told the Senate the entire crypto world was the mother of all scams. And this is where we have  to be honest because they were partly right. The industry has had a lot of real fraud including the  collapses of FTX Celsius Terror Block 5 Voyager and dozens of smaller failures that destroyed  billions of dollars of regular people's savings.

[00:05:48]However, that doesn't mean the core technology is  invalid. During the early days of the internet, we experienced something similar. The early  American stock market had so much fraud that the entire Securities and Exchange Commission had  to be created to stop it. The cycle of fraud has consistently gotten rid of bad players. While  the core network of Bitcoin has kept growing, Diamond and Rubini mixed up the dishonest crypto  industry with the honest Bitcoin protocol based on rules and code. Bitcoin itself has never  been successfully attacked at its core. Has never gone offline for a meaningful time and  processed every single transaction during every collapse they predicted would kill it. Now, the  most recent and loudest wave is the Ponzi scheme argument championed by Peter Schiff since 2011  and reignited by Ben McKenzie just recently.

[00:06:39]The argument is that Bitcoin's price only goes  up because new buyers have to keep coming in to pay off the existing holders. At first,  this sounds rather convincing on a podcast, but it doesn't hold up to the actual definition.  A Ponzi scheme requires a central person or group promising specific returns to participants.  Bitcoin has no operator, no promised returns, and no central party making any commitment to  anyone. Returns happen because of market demand.

[00:07:06]Plus, if you applied the same Ponzi accusation,  honestly, you would have to say the same about gold, stocks, real estate, Pokemon cards, fine  art, and every other asset that goes up in value because more people use it and adopt it rather  than from contractual income. It's a clever way to talk about it, but it's not the structural  definition. And this is why the entire 15-year record of failed predictions starts to make sense.  Every wave of criticism shares the same basic mistake. Critics constantly underestimated three  things. First, they underestimated how durable the network is, assuming any major hack, new law,  or market crash would end it. But the network has survived every single one of them, including  China's complete ban on Bitcoin mining in 2021, which removed about 70% of the global computing  power overnight without missing a single block.

[00:08:00]Second, they underestimate how widely it would  be adopted, assuming Bitcoin would only ever be for fringe groups and criminals. Instead, it has  been picked up by major governant wealth funds, public companies holding it on their balance  sheets, asset managers running spot ETF products, and most surprisingly, the United States  Indo-Pacific Command, which confirmed in 2026 that it runs a Bitcoin node as part of its  defense infrastructure. Third, they underestimated the idea of a monetary premium itself. Applying  the rules for valuing stocks to a monetary asset and concluding it had no value when monetary  assets are valued completely differently. You see, the critics are everything but dumb. They are  simply measuring with the wrong tools. And here's the part that almost no one is willing to say out  loud. The real long-term risks to Bitcoin are not the ones Krugman, Buffett, Diamond Schiff, or  Ben McKenzie ever talked about. They are focused on three areas that serious crypto investors are  actually worried about. The first is coordinated bans by governments, often pushed by global  financial groups like FATF, like the rules South Africa is currently making. The draft regulations  published by South Africa's Treasury in April 2026 reclassify crypto's capital, give authorities the  power to force people to hand over private keys, and propose fines of up to 1 million rand and  5 years in jail for not following those rules.

[00:09:27]If enough major countries adopt this type of rule,  the ability to resist government control starts to weaken through the legal system rather than a tech  hack. The protocol doesn't need to be broken. It just needs to be made illegal to access without  proving your identity and 99 countries have already passed a related travel rule legislation.  The infrastructure is being built right now.

[00:09:51]The second risk is the long-term question of the  security budget. The amount of new Bitcoin created per block is cut in half every four years. At the  current rate of 3.125 BTC per block, miners make about $250,000 per block, or roughly $35 million  in daily revenue. However, the transaction fees that users pay drop to less than 1% of the  miner's total income in late April. If fees don't increase enough to replace the subsidy as  it continues to have in 2028, 32, 36, and beyond, the security budget that protects the network gets  weaker with every cycle. And there's no agreed upon solution for this problem yet. And the third  risk is quantum computing. Google's work in 2024 validated the necessary assumptions for quantum  error correction. And a March 2026 paper from Google quantum AI estimated that breaking the type  of cryptography Bitcoin uses, which are elliptic curve signatures, might require fewer than half  a million physical cubits, which is about 20 times less than prior estimates. Approximately  25% of all Bitcoin is held in addresses where the public key is exposed and would be vulnerable  to a powerful enough quantum computer. A proposal called BIP 360 was added to the official  Bitcoin improvement proposal repository in February to create a plan for a quantum resistant  upgrade, but the politics of forcing old school hodlers to move their coins, including the  roughly 1.1 million BTC linked to Satoshi, are totally unresolved. Of course, none of these  three risks guarantees Bitcoin goes to zero. But all of them are far more believable than anything  public critics have ever argued, and the honest investor takes them seriously, watches them, and  adjusts their confidence accordingly. So, here's the question that really matters. Will Bitcoin's  adoption by big institutions and governments keep growing faster than the slow decay of people being  able to hold their own keys without government oversight allowing the network to become stronger  through its legitimacy? Or will the combination of government checkpoints, an uncertain security  budget path, and a quickly approaching quantum timeline ultimately hold the asset back in ways  that 15 years of critics using stock market frameworks completely failed to see? Please get  highly opinionated in the comments below because this is the debate that actually matters for  anyone holding Bitcoin into the next decade.

[00:12:22]If you want to understand exactly how the FATF  travel rule is being woven into the OECD crypto asset reporting framework that started in South  Africa and how that system is now spreading across the G20 countries, then you should definitely  check out our deep dive video right over here.

[00:12:40]Thank you all so much for watching and I'll see  you again very soon. This is DC signing off.