As Bitcoin's price took a sharp dive to “pre-Elon Musk pump” levels of $30,000, mainstream media took an unsurprising approach covering the marketwide crash by announcing that Bitcoin is dead.
The end of Bitcoin (BTC) has now been announced more than 400 times in 12 years, according to the Bitcoin Obituaries archive. There are 414 obituaries for Bitcoin since its inception in 2010, and Wednesday's post-mortem assessments of Bitcoin are still being added.
The obituaries range from calling Bitcoin the biggest Ponzi scheme in history to comparing BTC to Monopoly money.
The first year of crypto shows only one record, when Bitcoin's price was $0.23, explaining that Bitcoin can’t be a currency. More than a quarter of the submissions are related to the 2017 Bitcoin bull run and the huge crash afterward.
While the negative stories on Bitcoin arrive primarily in times of price crashes, Bitcoin obituaries data shows that it’s not unusual to have an article burying the largest cryptocurrency while the market is still growing.
Bitcoin has always been a good topic for the mainstream media to criticize. Its price volatility, the still-unsolved mystery of creator Satoshi Nakamoto, and its decentralized structure that enables usage in illegal transactions make Bitcoin an easy target for sensational headlines.
This week’s price dip similarly triggered apocalyptic headlines from a slew of mainstream media outlets. Over $350 billion was lost in cryptocurrency market capitalization, and altcoins saw a 15%–30% price dip throughout the day. Some major crypto trading platforms such as Coinbase, Binance and Gemini experienced downtimes due to the unusual market activity.
Despite the crash, some experts are convinced that the market will bounce back. Yesterday, Cointelegraph organized a livestream to analyze and understand the market’s situation, with Charlie Burton and Michaël van de Poppe as guests. The question “Was today’s market movement the end of the bull cycle?” received a solid “No” from both guests.