Found this fossil from The Guardian, dated October 18, 2011. BTC had crashed from $33 to under $2. Mining was uneconomical, botnets were doing the heavy lifting, and Paul Krugman was already writing obituaries.
“The value of Bitcoins… has plummeted across exchanges – to a level where it costs more to ‘mine’ them than they are worth.”
“It’s an endless cycle of stupidity that simply cannot be solved by human nature.”
“The biggest weakness about Bitcoin was that… their apparent value was based on small numbers of transactions within a small group.”
MTGox was in full clown mode. Someone dumped 400,000 coins, nuked the price to one cent, and the exchange just… unplugged itself. Classic 2011 energy.
Krugman chimed in, saying:
“What we want from a monetary system isn’t to make people holding money rich… the Bitcoin economy has in effect experienced massive deflation.”
Meanwhile Surowiecki casually dropped this:
“The vast majority of bitcoins are held by people hoping to sell them to other people.”
So basically, not much has changed.
But here's the kicker: back then, there were only 7.48 million coins mined. Network hash rate was falling. Everyone thought the experiment was over. And yet, the whole thing kept crawling forward like a rat in a sewer, unglamorous, mostly forgotten, but alive.
t’s 2025. The tickers are green (not today, but sometimes), the candles are tall (when they feel like it), and most still have no real grasp of the technology behind it. But in 2011, when Bitcoin slipped under two dollars, nobody talked about inflation hedges or monetary revolutions. They were selling their GPUs on forums and calling it a failed experiment.
And still, the chain kept ticking. Nobody fixed it. Nothing was fixed. It just kept working anyway. Just blocks. One after another. Like nothing happened.
That’s the whole story. The rest is just commentary.
