In 2018, Harvard economist Kenneth Rogoff said bitcoin was far more likely to fall to $100 than reach $100,000. By August 2025, bitcoin had spent more than 100 days above $100,000, and Harvard had disclosed a $100 million-plus position in BlackRock’s bitcoin ETF.

Rogoff’s miss came from three assumptions: bitcoin was mainly for criminals, governments would regulate it into irrelevance, and it had little utility without illicit use. Those assumptions ignored why people choose bitcoin when ordinary financial rails fail them.

Permissionless access, borderless settlement, and censorship resistance matter for remittances, cross-border trade, dissidents, people escaping broken currencies, and anyone who wants savings outside a government-controlled monetary system. Use in hard conditions demonstrates that the network works when access and settlement matter most.

Credentials can make someone better at defending the system that rewarded them. Understanding bitcoin requires enough humility to test that system’s assumptions against what people actually do. So why did a brilliant economist see bitcoin’s real-world use as evidence against it?

Read the full argument: https://firebtc.io/p/harvard-humbled