In 2018, Harvard economist Kenneth Rogoff made a big call: Bitcoin would never reach $100,000 and was more likely to fall to $100. Seven years later, he’s eating his words.
Bitcoin didn’t just survive — it boomed. It hit $100,000 for the first time in December 2024 and in mid-August 2025, it briefly touched a record high of almost $124,200 before settling above $112,000.
For Rogoff, a former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), this was a big reversal of his forecast.
“Almost a decade ago, I was the Harvard economist that said Bitcoin was more likely to be worth $100 than 100K. What did I miss?” Rogoff asked in a recent post on X.
Rogoff said he made three big mistakes.
First, he was “far too optimistic about the U.S. coming to its senses about sensible cryptocurrency regulation”.
In 2018, he thought government crackdowns would trigger a price collapse. Instead, regulation was patchy and in many cases leaned in favor of bitcoin.
Under President Donald Trump, landmark legislation like the Genius Act and the Clarity Act created frameworks for digital assets, including stablecoins and digital asset exchanges.
Prior to that, during Biden’s administration, the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), was finally convinced to approve bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs), further boosting the appeal of the scarce digital asset.
Second, he underestimated Bitcoin’s role in the global underground economy. He didn’t think it would become a medium of exchange in what he called the “twenty-trillion dollar global underground economy”.
Transactions like international remittances and high-value cross-border transfers created steady demand for bitcoin because they were cheaper and faster, setting a kind of price floor that cash alone couldn’t provide.
Third, he was surprised by the political conflicts of interest.
He wrote that he had not anticipated “a situation where regulators, and especially the regulator in chief, would be able to brazenly hold hundreds of millions (if not billions) of dollars in cryptocurrencies seemingly without consequence given the blatant conflict of interest.”
That’s a reference to President Trump and his allies, many of whom now openly hold significant stakes in digital assets.
Reports say Trump himself controls over $1 billion in digital asset wealth across wallets, business ventures and even a meme coin bearing his name.
His media company, Trump Media & Technology Group, holds over 15,000 bitcoin, worth billions of dollars.
Beyond politics, Rogoff admitted he didn’t fully get how Bitcoin would compete with fiat currencies and how fast it would spread.
In countries where local currencies collapsed due to inflation or mismanagement, bitcoin has been used as a hedge and store of value.
“I did not appreciate how Bitcoin would compete with fiat currencies to serve as the transactions medium of choice,” Rogoff said.
What started as a digital experiment has attracted institutional investors, everyday users, and even elite universities.
In fact, Harvard Management Company, which oversees the university’s $53 billion endowment, recently disclosed a $116 million investment in BlackRock’s spot Bitcoin ETF, one of its largest single positions.
Kenneth Rogoff’s admission has sparked reactions across the Bitcoin world.
Matt Hougan, chief investment officer at Bitwise, said Rogoff failed to see Bitcoin’s decentralized nature.
“(He) failed to imagine that a decentralized project, which drew power from people and not centralized institutions, could succeed at scale,” Hougan said.
Matthew Sigel of VanEck ranked Rogoff among Bitcoin’s biggest critics, saying he “wrote Bitcoin’s obituary too early from within his own echo chamber.”
David Lawant, a researcher at FalconX, was even more blunt. He said he was “thankful” for Rogoff’s old writings, claiming his book The Curse of Cash was “so terrible” that it pushed him toward Bitcoin.
Kenneth Rogoff’s mistake has become more than just a story about one economist’s bad prediction.
It’s a reminder of the challenges traditional economic models have in understanding decentralized, fast-moving markets like bitcoin.
