Why People Still Believe Bitcoin Will Die

One of Bitcoin’s most compelling properties is its unstoppable nature. So why do so many people in a recent survey think it will fail by 2024?

Want concrete evidence of the chasm of understanding between “regular people” and crypto enthusiasts? Check out the results of a survey of 2,000 retail clients conducted by Deutsche Bank last week.

The most shocking finding is not that a third of respondents think Bitcoin will fall below $20,000 by the end of the year. That’s less than half of its current price and well below Anthony Scaramucci’s $170,000 target. Scaramucci’s forecast and other bullish views agree that after the next halving in April, ETF-driven demand will collide with increasingly scarce supply, pushing prices higher.

What really keeps me on edge is the question of Bitcoin’s survival: more people think Bitcoin will disappear in the next few years than believe it will always exist.

Knowing my readership, I’m sure many of you are shaking your heads right now, thinking of the old “Bitcoin is dead” meme. As this website that chronicles Bitcoin’s deaths wittily points out, Bitcoin has “died” 475 times since 2010.

However, the real joke is on us. After all these years, countless counterfactuals that proved the naysayers foolish, and despite Bitcoin’s best investment return in 13 years post-financial crisis, people still think it’s going to disappear, which is undoubtedly a huge failure of publicity and communication in the industry. We haven’t really explained what Bitcoin is and made it understandable to “regular people”.

misunderstanding

I admit that I, like many others, feel frustrated and annoyed by the general public’s misunderstanding of Bitcoin. This mentality only widens the gap in understanding, making it more difficult for us to gain the trust of “ordinary people” like Amin and help him understand this complex and unfamiliar concept.

My knee-jerk reaction when I saw the Deutsche survey results was: come on, really? Bitcoin is going to die this year? How on earth is it going to go away? Who is going to turn it off? Bitcoin is open source code, and no one person or company has a switch to turn it off. Are you saying that everyone involved will act collectively to make it go away? Do you really think that the thousands of people who have invested their time and energy in this - miners, developers, investors, users - who cannot coordinate at all, will collectively abandon it at the same time? Well, okay...

The reason why Bitcoin's death theory is so annoying is that it directly contradicts Bitcoin's core value proposition: it can't be shut down. In a world where anything can be controlled by a government, a bank, an online platform, or a hacker, unstoppable is a powerful concept. We have an incredible invention: a mathematically based, immutable value transfer system that automatically generates a new block of transaction records every ten minutes, completely free from any interference or censorship. People should really marvel at it.

But this is not the case.

This is probably because the concept is too abstract. What tangible benefit does it have for him? He has dollars, and they more or less meet his needs. While he may not be happy with the government, he accepts its monetary system. It makes no sense for him to think about how an uncensorable, depoliticized form of value exchange could transcend state-dependent systems on a global scale and support human sovereignty.

Distrust

What the “ordinary person” Amin needs is trust, and unfortunately, he is not getting that from the cryptocurrency community.

If someone tries to sell him something he doesn’t understand, Armin sets a higher bar for trusting that person. When the behavior of people associated with that something confirms his bias, he concludes that they—and what they’re selling—can’t be trusted.

All the noise, the boasting, the “fly to the moon” and “stay poor” memes, the ostentation, the obsession…whether or not these behaviors were justified, made it harder for Amin to believe in Bitcoin.

What we need is simple, empathetic communication.