⸺ Obituary · December 30, 2017 ⸺
“Bitcoin—The Andromeda Strain Of Computer Science Research”
— SMBlog, Steven M. Bellovin
“Bitcoin has failed. The failures weren’t inevitable; there are solutions to these problems in the acdemic literature. But Bitcoin was deployed by enthusiasts who in essence let experimental code escape from a lab to the world, without thinking about the engineering issues—and now they’re stuck with it.”
Price at death
$12,630
Today
$73,484
Resurrection
×5.8
On 2017-12-30, Steven M. Bellovin (Professor, Columbia University) declared Bitcoin dead via SMBlog. Bitcoin was trading at ~$12,630 at the time. The call joins the growing canon of premature obituaries.
The declaration was catalogued on December 30, 2017, when one Bitcoin traded for approximately $12,630. Since then, Bitcoin has appreciated by 5.8× relative to the price on the day SMBlog pronounced it finished.