Imagine predicting the death of bitcoin 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 death or demise of the cryptocurrency.
The publication, titled “Why bitcoin can’t be a currency“, argued that bitcoin lacked the mechanisms to handle fluctuations in demand, which would lead it to lose its value over time. He wrote:
“In nature, positive feedback loops like those that exist with bitcoin are lethal; the only thing that has kept bitcoin alive for so long is its novelty. Either it will remain novelty forever or it will go from novelty status to death faster than you can blink.”
Since then, bitcoin, the world’s most famous cryptocurrency, has defied critics and detractors like Lynch, and has since increased in value by a staggering 15 million percent. In fact, bitcoin has consistently defied the odds, transforming from a niche experiment to a global financial phenomenon.
Still, the post, discovered today by bitcoin historian Pete Rizzo, stands out for demonstrating just how wrong bitcoin critics can be, with Lynch specifically arguing that economies need intervention and that bitcoin would fail because it lacks it.
“The reason this can’t happen with government currencies is that government currencies *are* backed,” he wrote. “They are backed by bullets. If demand for dollars starts to fall faster than the US government would like, the US government can simply raise taxes without increasing spending, increasing demand and reducing supply simultaneously. There are a lot of things the FED can do, for example “Of course, and the FED tends to act first, but its operations are harder to explain. “Obviously, this is not a perfect mechanism, as bubbles still pop and burst, but even this mechanism is not available with bitcoin.”
Today, more and more people see how destructive such intervention can be, as central banks struggle to contain inflation around the world.
