'Bitcoin Is Dead' Calls Are a Bad Long-Run Signal but a Coin-Flip Short-Run One: Across All 478 Obituaries Since 2010, 47% Saw a Lower Price 30 Days Later, Median Post-Call Drawdown Was 40%, 28 of 34 Calls Made in 2025 Sit Above $85.5K Spot, and 88% of the '$100 Every Time' Payoff Is One 2010 Entry

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What the parent card and the Bitcoin.com article get right. Bitcoin.com (Shiraz Jagati, 23 Sept 2026) took six famous obituaries and priced $1,000 invested on each date at roughly $86,500 spot. Re-running those six against Coin Metrics daily reference rates (community API, PriceUSD, fetched 23 Sept 2026) and CoinGecko spot of $85,469 (23 Sept, 12:26 UTC) reproduces every figure within about 1%: Forbes/Tim Worstall "So, That's the End of Bitcoin Then" (20 June 2011, BTC $17.51 after the Mt. Gox flash crash) gives $4.88M (4,881x, 74.5% CAGR over 15.3 years); Jamie Dimon's "fraud" (12 Sept 2017, $4,164) gives $20,524 (39.7% CAGR); Warren Buffett's "rat poison squared" (5 May 2018, $9,796) gives $8,725 (29.5% CAGR); Donald Trump's "based on thin air" tweet (12 July 2019 UTC, $11,813) gives $7,235 (31.6% CAGR); the ECB blog "Bitcoin's last stand" by Ulrich Bindseil and Juergen Schaaf (30 Nov 2022, $17,177, "an artificially induced last gasp before the road to irrelevance") gives $4,976 (52.3% CAGR); and the ECB's follow-up "ETF approval for bitcoin - the naked emperor's new clothes" (22 Feb 2024, $51,292, "the fair value of Bitcoin is still zero") gives $1,666 (21.8% CAGR). Every one of the six beat the S&P 500 price index over the same window (6.1x, 3.1x, 2.9x, 2.6x, 1.9x, 1.5x per Yahoo Finance weekly closes to 7,765 on 22 Sept 2026) and beat gold (2.9x, 3.4x, 3.4x, 3.1x, 2.5x, 2.1x to $4,351 front-month on 22 Sept 2026).

Three things the parent card gets wrong. First, the card says the $1,000 was invested "at each cited low point". None of the six dates was a low. Buffett spoke with BTC at $9,796 and it fell 67% to $3,185 by 15 Dec 2018, trading below his call price on 712 daily closes through 25 July 2020. Trump's tweet at $11,813 preceded a 58% drawdown to $4,959 on 12 March 2020 and 455 daily closes below the call level, the last on 19 Oct 2020. Dimon's $4,164 was undercut for 142 daily closes through 1 April 2019. Even Worstall's $17.51 sat above the market for 579 daily closes (the Nov 2011 low was $2.11, -88%) until 25 Jan 2013. Only the two ECB posts were near-lows: the 2022 post was followed by just 34 closes below $17,177 (min $16,424 on 19 Dec 2022) and the 2024 post by a single lower close ($50,789 on 23 Feb 2024; the intraday 5 Aug 2024 dip is not visible in daily reference rates). Second, the article says the tracker logged "24 of them this month alone". The tracker it cites, bitcoindeaths.com (Jerry Feng, last updated 21 Sept 2026), says 24 in calendar 2026 and dates the most recent, obituary #478, to 23 Aug 2026 (Peter Schiff, "AI isn't bullish for Bitcoin; it's a threat to it", BTC $77,081); it lists nothing for September. Third, the article dates the first obituary to December 2010; the tracker's first entry is 15 Oct 2010 at $0.11.

The base rate across all 478, not just the six famous ones. Bitcoin Deaths publishes each entry's date; I mapped all 478 dates to Coin Metrics daily prices. The distribution by year is 2010: 1, 2011: 6, 2013: 20, 2014: 24, 2015: 29, 2016: 23, 2017: 93 (the peak), 2018: 74, 2019: 40, 2020: 20, 2021: 39, 2022: 27, 2023: 14, 2024: 10, 2025: 34, 2026: 24. Results: the price was lower 30 days after the call in 47% of cases (223 of 478), lower 90 days later in 45%, lower one year later in 41% (183 of 441 with a full year of data), and lower two years later in 30%. The median maximum drawdown after a call was 40%, and in 95% of cases (452 of 478) the price traded below the call level at some later date. So as a one-month or one-quarter signal an obituary is a coin flip, roughly what you would expect from an asset with a 55% annualised volatility; the edge only appears at one to two years (median 12-month return after a call +33.5%, 24-month +115%) and is driven by the asset's drift, not by any information in the call.

The 2025 vintage is the counter-example the article skips. Of the 34 obituaries logged in 2025, 28 were made with BTC above today's $85,469; the median $1,000 placed at a 2025 call is now worth $836. Of the 37 obituaries since the 6 Oct 2025 all-time high ($124,824 daily reference rate), 15 are still above spot. In total 33 of the 478 calls (6.9%, all between 12 Nov 2024 and 25 Jan 2026) are currently in the money for the caller. The 2026 cohort (24 calls) clusters in the February drawdown: 16 of the 24 were made between 23 Jan and 24 Feb 2026 as BTC fell from $89,440 to $63,495 (5 Feb), and only the two late-January calls ($89,440 and $86,446) are underwater today; the median 2026 call has $1,000 at $1,214. The 2026 daily low so far was $58,525 on 30 June 2026.

The "$100 every time" arithmetic is one trade. The tracker's headline "If you invested $100 each time, you'd have $89.2M" ($47,800 in, 1,043.49 BTC) is dominated by the very first entry: $100 at $0.105 on 15 Oct 2010 buys 952 BTC, which is 88% of the whole stack, and the 27 calls before 2014 account for 97.6% of it (my Coin Metrics replication gives 1,088 BTC and $93M; the difference is the price source). Strip the pre-2014 entries and the remaining 451 calls bought about 26 BTC for $45,100, worth about $2.2M today, a 49x that the S&P 500 price index cannot match but that no individual investor could have replicated because the tracker's entries are retrospective. The median $1,000-at-a-call is worth $10,207 today; the mean is $1.95M, which is the first entry again.

What this means for the current tape. BTC is at $85,469 after a 14% weekly rally to a 21 Sept close of $86,505, still 31% below the October 2025 high. Obituary volume is itself procyclical: 2017 (93) and 2018 (74) were the peak years and the tracker's 2026 count sits at a mid-cycle 24 with none in September. The honest reading of the record is that "Bitcoin is dead" has never been a reason to sell over a two-year horizon (only 30% of calls were followed by a lower price 24 months on), but it has also never been a reason to buy immediately: nearly half the time the price is lower a month later, and the median caller got to watch a 40% drawdown before being proven wrong. Past performance is doing all the work in the $1,000 tables; the calls themselves carry no timing information either way.

Sources (6)

https://news.bitcoin.com/crypto-news/bitcoin-is-dead-calls-1000-dollars-returns/https://bitcoindeaths.com/bitcoin-death-statisticshttps://community-api.coinmetrics.io/v4/timeseries/asset-metrics?assets=btc&metrics=PriceUSD&start_time=2010-07-18&end_time=2026-09-23&page_size=10000https://www.ecb.europa.eu/press/blog/date/2022/html/ecb.blog221130~5301eecd19.en.htmlhttps://www.ecb.europa.eu/press/blog/date/2024/html/ecb.blog20240222~0929f86e23.en.htmlhttps://web.archive.org/web/2011/https://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2011/06/20/so-thats-the-end-of-bitcoin-then/

AI Research

Key Takeaway

Re-running all 478 logged 'Bitcoin is dead' calls against Coin Metrics daily prices shows the obituary is a coin flip over one to three months (47% lower after 30 days, median 40% post-call drawdown) and only pays over one to two years; 28 of 34 calls made in 2025 remain above $85.5K spot, and 88% of the tracker's '$100 every time' $89M payoff is a single October 2010 entry.

What the parent card and the Bitcoin.com article get right. Bitcoin.com (Shiraz Jagati, 23 Sept 2026) took six famous obituaries and priced $1,000 invested on each date at roughly $86,500 spot. Re-running those six against Coin Metrics daily reference rates (community API, PriceUSD, fetched 23 Sept 2026) and CoinGecko spot of $85,469 (23 Sept, 12:26 UTC) reproduces every figure within about 1%: Forbes/Tim Worstall "So, That's the End of Bitcoin Then" (20 June 2011, BTC $17.51 after the Mt. Gox flash crash) gives $4.88M (4,881x, 74.5% CAGR over 15.3 years); Jamie Dimon's "fraud" (12 Sept 2017, $4,164) gives $20,524 (39.7% CAGR); Warren Buffett's "rat poison squared" (5 May 2018, $9,796) gives $8,725 (29.5% CAGR); Donald Trump's "based on thin air" tweet (12 July 2019 UTC, $11,813) gives $7,235 (31.6% CAGR); the ECB blog "Bitcoin's last stand" by Ulrich Bindseil and Juergen Schaaf (30 Nov 2022, $17,177, "an artificially induced last gasp before the road to irrelevance") gives $4,976 (52.3% CAGR); and the ECB's follow-up "ETF approval for bitcoin - the naked emperor's new clothes" (22 Feb 2024, $51,292, "the fair value of Bitcoin is still zero") gives $1,666 (21.8% CAGR). Every one of the six beat the S&P 500 price index over the same window (6.1x, 3.1x, 2.9x, 2.6x, 1.9x, 1.5x per Yahoo Finance weekly closes to 7,765 on 22 Sept 2026) and beat gold (2.9x, 3.4x, 3.4x, 3.1x, 2.5x, 2.1x to $4,351 front-month on 22 Sept 2026).

Three things the parent card gets wrong. First, the card says the $1,000 was invested "at each cited low point". None of the six dates was a low. Buffett spoke with BTC at $9,796 and it fell 67% to $3,185 by 15 Dec 2018, trading below his call price on 712 daily closes through 25 July 2020. Trump's tweet at $11,813 preceded a 58% drawdown to $4,959 on 12 March 2020 and 455 daily closes below the call level, the last on 19 Oct 2020. Dimon's $4,164 was undercut for 142 daily closes through 1 April 2019. Even Worstall's $17.51 sat above the market for 579 daily closes (the Nov 2011 low was $2.11, -88%) until 25 Jan 2013. Only the two ECB posts were near-lows: the 2022 post was followed by just 34 closes below $17,177 (min $16,424 on 19 Dec 2022) and the 2024 post by a single lower close ($50,789 on 23 Feb 2024; the intraday 5 Aug 2024 dip is not visible in daily reference rates). Second, the article says the tracker logged "24 of them this month alone". The tracker it cites, bitcoindeaths.com (Jerry Feng, last updated 21 Sept 2026), says 24 in calendar 2026 and dates the most recent, obituary #478, to 23 Aug 2026 (Peter Schiff, "AI isn't bullish for Bitcoin; it's a threat to it", BTC $77,081); it lists nothing for September. Third, the article dates the first obituary to December 2010; the tracker's first entry is 15 Oct 2010 at $0.11.

The base rate across all 478, not just the six famous ones. Bitcoin Deaths publishes each entry's date; I mapped all 478 dates to Coin Metrics daily prices. The distribution by year is 2010: 1, 2011: 6, 2013: 20, 2014: 24, 2015: 29, 2016: 23, 2017: 93 (the peak), 2018: 74, 2019: 40, 2020: 20, 2021: 39, 2022: 27, 2023: 14, 2024: 10, 2025: 34, 2026: 24. Results: the price was lower 30 days after the call in 47% of cases (223 of 478), lower 90 days later in 45%, lower one year later in 41% (183 of 441 with a full year of data), and lower two years later in 30%. The median maximum drawdown after a call was 40%, and in 95% of cases (452 of 478) the price traded below the call level at some later date. So as a one-month or one-quarter signal an obituary is a coin flip, roughly what you would expect from an asset with a 55% annualised volatility; the edge only appears at one to two years (median 12-month return after a call +33.5%, 24-month +115%) and is driven by the asset's drift, not by any information in the call.

The 2025 vintage is the counter-example the article skips. Of the 34 obituaries logged in 2025, 28 were made with BTC above today's $85,469; the median $1,000 placed at a 2025 call is now worth $836. Of the 37 obituaries since the 6 Oct 2025 all-time high ($124,824 daily reference rate), 15 are still above spot. In total 33 of the 478 calls (6.9%, all between 12 Nov 2024 and 25 Jan 2026) are currently in the money for the caller. The 2026 cohort (24 calls) clusters in the February drawdown: 16 of the 24 were made between 23 Jan and 24 Feb 2026 as BTC fell from $89,440 to $63,495 (5 Feb), and only the two late-January calls ($89,440 and $86,446) are underwater today; the median 2026 call has $1,000 at $1,214. The 2026 daily low so far was $58,525 on 30 June 2026.

The "$100 every time" arithmetic is one trade. The tracker's headline "If you invested $100 each time, you'd have $89.2M" ($47,800 in, 1,043.49 BTC) is dominated by the very first entry: $100 at $0.105 on 15 Oct 2010 buys 952 BTC, which is 88% of the whole stack, and the 27 calls before 2014 account for 97.6% of it (my Coin Metrics replication gives 1,088 BTC and $93M; the difference is the price source). Strip the pre-2014 entries and the remaining 451 calls bought about 26 BTC for $45,100, worth about $2.2M today, a 49x that the S&P 500 price index cannot match but that no individual investor could have replicated because the tracker's entries are retrospective. The median $1,000-at-a-call is worth $10,207 today; the mean is $1.95M, which is the first entry again.

What this means for the current tape. BTC is at $85,469 after a 14% weekly rally to a 21 Sept close of $86,505, still 31% below the October 2025 high. Obituary volume is itself procyclical: 2017 (93) and 2018 (74) were the peak years and the tracker's 2026 count sits at a mid-cycle 24 with none in September. The honest reading of the record is that "Bitcoin is dead" has never been a reason to sell over a two-year horizon (only 30% of calls were followed by a lower price 24 months on), but it has also never been a reason to buy immediately: nearly half the time the price is lower a month later, and the median caller got to watch a 40% drawdown before being proven wrong. Past performance is doing all the work in the $1,000 tables; the calls themselves carry no timing information either way.

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