00:00Bitcoin is going to zero. You've heard this scary prediction for 15 years repeated confidently by
00:07some of the smartest people around. Paul Krugman, a famous economist, said it in the New York Times
00:13back in 2013. Warren Buffett, the legendary investor, called it rat poison squared in 2018.
00:21Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JP Morgan, called it a fraud in 2017. Another well-known economist,
00:27Nouriel Roubini, called it the mother of all scams. Then there's my personal favorite, Peter Schiff.
00:34He's been predicting Bitcoin's end since 2011 and more recently actor Ben McKenzie released a book
00:40in 2023 and produced a documentary in 2025 calling it the biggest pyramid scheme ever. Every one of
00:49these predictions has been wrong about the price, wrong about Bitcoin surviving and of course they
00:53were wrong about people actually using it. But here's what most people in the crypto world won't
01:00admit. Some of these critics weren't entirely wrong, some of their arguments deserve a serious look
01:06and one version of the pessimistic case which barely anyone dares to mention could actually still happen.
01:14My name is DC and you're watching The Coin Bureau.
01:19A website called Bitcoin Obitiaries has been keeping track of every public statement declaring Bitcoin
01:25dead since 2010. The count is now up to 477 separate funerals. Each prediction came from an expert,
01:33a major news source, a respected economist or a famous investor. And each one has been wrong,
01:39costing people money who listened, while the asset itself has grown from about 7 cents in 2010 to
01:46roughly $80,000 today, with an all-time high of over 126,000 in 2025. Now the attacks come in
01:54waves.
01:54The first set of put-downs happened between 2010 and 2013 when Bitcoin was only interesting to tech
02:00people and libertarians. The second wave hit right after the Mt. Gox exchange collapsed in 2014,
02:07when about 850,000 PTC vanished and everyone agreed the experiment was over. Then the third wave came
02:14in 2018 after the frenzy over ICOs ended and prices crashed from almost $20,000 to around $3,200.
02:22The fourth wave arrived in 2022 after major companies like Terra, Celsius and FTX collapsed in one year.
02:30And it seems as if we are experiencing another wave just now.
02:34Now, simply put, this prediction that Bitcoin will fail is the longest running major financial guess
02:41in the modern world. And it has the absolute worst track record of any prediction in any market ever
02:48recorded. Now the interesting question is not if the critics were wrong, the price proves that.
02:53The interesting question is why they were wrong. Because most of them are arguably very smart people,
02:58using financial rules that worked well for every other type of asset in history.
03:04And this brings us to the first serious criticism, the economist's view. This was led by Paul Krugman's
03:102013 article calling Bitcoin a bubble. This view was backed up by many academics who argued Bitcoin had
03:17no real value, couldn't work as a form of payment because its price was too volatile and could never handle
03:23the volume of a real payment system. You might think that argument was just wrong on the facts,
03:29but that misses the point. Krugman was right that Bitcoin is bad for buying coffee every day. In fact,
03:34it's terrible for buying coffee every day. And he was right that its basic speed can compare with Visa.
03:40What he got wrong was the category. Bitcoin's real use ended up being totally different from what
03:46currency experts were comparing it to. It became a store of value that no government controls,
03:51and a global system for settling large amounts of money, not a daily spending tool. The idea wasn't
03:57wrong. The tool used to measure it was. The same mistake appeared in the second wave of criticism from
04:04the value investing world, where people like Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger argued that an asset that
04:10doesn't produce any income can't be worth anything in the long run. Munger went even further, calling the
04:17whole thing stupid and evil. The truth is that the method of valuing an asset based on its future cash
04:23flows works perfectly for company stocks, but it totally fails for monetary assets. Gold, for example,
04:29produces no cash flows at all, yet it has been considered money for about 5,000 years. Bitcoin is
04:35the digital version of that same idea of a monetary premium. And if you apply the rules for valuing stocks
04:42to it, you will always conclude it's worthless. The mistake was the framework, not the conclusion
04:48that followed from it. Before we move on, the speed of this story is why the Coin Bureau Telegram
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05:10It's genuinely worth it. Okay, right back to it. The third wave, the fraud idea, was pushed hardest
05:18by Jamie Dimon and Nouriel Roubini. Dimon called Bitcoin a fraud in 2017 and famously said,
05:24any of his traders caught using it would be fired. Roubini told the Senate the entire crypto world
05:30was the mother of all scams. And this is where we have to be honest, because they were partly right.
05:35The industry has had a lot of real fraud, including the collapses of FTX, Celsius, Terra, Block 5,
05:42Voyager, and dozens of smaller failures that destroyed billions of dollars of regular people's
05:47savings. However, that doesn't mean the core technology is invalid. During the early days of
05:53the internet, we experienced something similar. The early American stock market had so much fraud,
05:58that the entire Securities and Exchange Commission had to be created to stop it. The cycle of fraud has
06:05consistently gotten rid of bad players while the core network of Bitcoin has kept growing.
06:10Dimon and Roubini mixed up the dishonest crypto industry with the honest Bitcoin protocol based on
06:16rules and code. Bitcoin itself has never been successfully attacked at its core, has never gone offline for a
06:22meaningful time and processed every single transaction during every collapse they predicted would kill it.
06:28Now, the most recent and loudest wave is the Ponzi scheme argument championed by Peter Schiff since 2011
06:34and reignited by Ben McKenzie just recently. The argument is that Bitcoin's price only goes up because new buyers
06:43have to keep coming in to pay off the existing holders. At first, this sounds rather convincing on a podcast,
06:48but it doesn't hold up to the actual definition. A Ponzi scheme requires a central person or group promising
06:55specific returns to participants. Bitcoin has no operator, no promised returns and no central party
07:02making any commitment to anyone. Returns happen because of market demand. Plus, if you apply the same
07:08Ponzi accusation, honestly, you would have to say the same about gold, stocks, real estate,
07:14Pokemon cards, fine art and every other asset that goes up in value because more people use it and
07:20adopt it rather than from contractual income. It's a clever way to talk about it, but it's not the
07:26structural definition. And this is why the entire 15-year record of failed predictions starts to make
07:32sense. Every wave of criticism shares the same basic mistake. Critics constantly underestimated three
07:38things. First, they underestimated how durable the network is, assuming any major hack, new law or
07:45market crash would end it. But the network has survived every single one of them, including China's
07:51complete ban on Bitcoin mining in 2021, which removed about 70% of the global computing power overnight
07:58without missing a single block. Second, they underestimate how widely it would be adopted, assuming Bitcoin
08:05would only ever be for fringe groups and criminals. Instead, it has been picked up by major government
08:10wealth funds, public companies holding it on their balance sheets, asset managers running spot ETF
08:15products and, most surprisingly, the United States Indo-Pacific Command, which confirmed in 2026 that
08:22it runs a Bitcoin node as part of its defense infrastructure. Third, they underestimated the idea
08:29of a monetary premium itself. Applying the rules for valuing stocks to a monetary asset and
08:34concluding it had no value when monetary assets are valued completely differently. You see, the
08:40critics are everything but dumb. They are simply measuring with the wrong tools. And here's the
08:46part that almost no one is willing to say out loud. The real long-term risks to Bitcoin are not
08:51the ones
08:52Krugman, Buffett, Diamond, Schiff or Ben McKenzie ever talked about. They are focused on three areas that
08:58serious crypto investors are actually worried about. The first is coordinated bans by governments,
09:03often pushed by global financial groups like FATF, like the rules South Africa is currently making.
09:09The draft regulations published by South Africa's Treasury in April 2026 reclassify crypto as capital,
09:16give authorities the power to force people to hand over private keys and propose fines of up to one
09:23million rand and five years in jail for not following those rules. If enough major countries adopt this
09:29type of rule, the ability to resist government control starts to weaken through the legal system
09:34rather than a tech hack. The protocol doesn't need to be broken, it just needs to be made illegal
09:40to access without proving your identity and 99 countries have already passed a related travel rule
09:46legislation. The infrastructure is being built right now. The second risk is the long-term question of the
09:54security budget. The amount of new Bitcoin created per block is cut in half every four years. At the
10:00current rate of 3.125 BTC per block, miners make about $250,000 per block or roughly $35 million in
10:08daily revenue. However, the transaction fees that users pay drop to less than 1% of the miners' total
10:14income in late April. If fees don't increase enough to replace the subsidy as it continues to halve in
10:212028, 32, 36 and beyond, the security budget that protects the network gets weaker with every cycle
10:28and there's no agreed-upon solution for this problem yet. And the third risk is quantum computing.
10:35Google's work in 2024 validated the necessary assumptions for quantum error correction and a
10:41March 2026 paper from Google Quantum AI estimated that breaking the type of cryptography Bitcoin uses,
10:48which are elliptic curve signatures, might require fewer than half a million physical qubits, which is
10:54about 20 times less than prior estimates. Approximately 25% of all Bitcoin is held in addresses where the
11:01public key is exposed and would be vulnerable to a powerful enough quantum computer. A proposal called
11:08BIP360 was added to the official Bitcoin improvement proposal repository in February to create a plan for a
11:15quantum-resistant upgrade. But the politics of forcing old-school hodlers to move their coins, including
11:21the roughly 1.1 million BTC linked to Satoshi, are totally unresolved. Of course, none of these three risks
11:29guarantees Bitcoin goes to zero, but all of them are far more believable than anything public critics have ever
11:34argued. And the honest investor takes them seriously, watches them and adjusts their confidence accordingly.
11:41So here's the question that really matters. Will Bitcoin's adoption by big institutions and governments
11:47keep growing faster than the slow decay of people being able to hold their own keys without government
11:53oversight, allowing the network to become stronger through its legitimacy? Or will the combination of
12:00government checkpoints, an uncertain security budget path and a quickly approaching quantum timeline
12:06ultimately hold the asset back in ways that 15 years of critics using stock market frameworks completely
12:12failed to see? Please get highly opinionated in the comments below because this is the debate that
12:18actually matters for anyone holding Bitcoin into the next decade. If you want to understand exactly how
12:24the FATF travel rule is being woven into the OECD crypto asset reporting framework that started in
12:30South Africa and how that system is now spreading across the G20 countries, then you should definitely
12:36check out our deep dive video right over here. Thank you all so much for watching and I'll see you
12:42again
12:42very soon. This is DC signing off.
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