The Bureau of Historic Losses · The Skeptics' Ledger
Entry № 007
Paul Krugman
Nobel laureate, economist
“Bitcoin Is Evil”
$1,000 of Bitcoin the day they said it, at its peak
US$163,679
its high so far — 164×, reached October 2025
Worth today
US$82,91782.9×
live valuation · refreshed hourly · usd
As of 9 June 2026, $1,000 of Bitcoin bought when Paul Krugman said it (US$762 a coin) is worth US$82,917 today, and peaked at US$163,679 — 164× — in October 2025.
On the record
On 28 December 2013, with Bitcoin near US$750, the Nobel laureate Paul Krugman titled his New York Times column 'Bitcoin Is Evil.' It was the post's headline, not a spoken line. It is the earliest, lowest anchor in this ledger — and so the largest multiple. The figure above tracks what $1,000 then is worth now.
On 28 December 2013, the Nobel laureate Paul Krugman published a post on his New York Times blog, “The Conscience of a Liberal,” under a headline that has followed him ever since. He titled the column “Bitcoin Is Evil.” It is important to be precise about this, because the phrase is so often misquoted: those three words were the title of the post, not a sentence Krugman stood up and declared. He chose them as a headline, and a headline is a deliberate act.
The column itself was more measured than its banner. Krugman granted he was “a Bitcoin skeptic” on the economics — he could not see what anchored its value — and then turned to the politics, approvingly quoting the science-fiction writer Charlie Stross, who had argued that Bitcoin was “designed… to be pretty much impossible to regulate” and, in Stross's words, built “as a weapon” against central banks and the state's monetary power. The “evil” in the headline was that political objection, sharpened for the page.
Bitcoin was trading around US$750 the day the post went up. That detail matters more here than on any other page in this ledger, because December 2013 is the earliest dismissal in the set — which makes US$750 the lowest anchor, which makes the number at the top of this page the largest multiple the Bureau has on file. Of all the people who called it early, Krugman called it earliest.
The Bureau notes, with no editorial heat, only the arithmetic the headline could not foresee: whatever “evil” Bitcoin was in 2013, it has compounded the trait handsomely since. That is a fact about the asset, and it settles nothing about Krugman's politics, which were a verdict on what Bitcoin was for, not a forecast of what its chart would do. He was writing about power. The chart was answering a different question, and it has been answering it loudly for more than a decade.
Where they stand now
Krugman never recanted. In 2018 he wondered aloud whether Bitcoin was a bubble wrapped in techno-mystique; by 2022, after the year's crashes, he wrote that crypto had built an “illusion of respectability” on celebrity endorsements and lobbying, and likened its structure to the subprime mortgages that detonated in 2008 (Reason's catalogue of his decade of calls). The headline was 2013; the skepticism never left.
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