The Man Who Predicted Bitcoin at $100 Just Made His Most Controversial Forecast Yet

Watching a brilliant person make a spectacular mistake in public and then return, not quite humbled, to explain why they weren’t completely wrong after all has an almost cinematic quality. In the summer of 2025, Kenneth Rogoff is essentially standing in the shadow of a prediction that the price of bitcoin was more likely to drop to $100 than rise to $100,000. With Bitcoin currently trading at about $112,000, that call appears to be not just wrong but nearly mythological.

In 2018, Rogoff made the initial prediction in a CNBC interview that went viral in the cryptocurrency community, primarily as a joke. At the time, governments were making noises about regulation, bitcoin was trading below $10,000, and it seemed entirely plausible—at least to economists with traditional training—that the whole thing would be squeezed into irrelevance. Rogoff’s logic wasn’t illogical.

He thought that when faced with a tool being openly used for illicit transactions and tax evasion, regulators would eventually take the same course of action as governments: tighten their grip.They didn’t. And that’s exactly where Rogoff’s thinking went wrong, he now acknowledges.

This past Tuesday, Rogoff discussed the discrepancy between his expectations and reality in a post on X with a candor that is, to be honest, a little uncommon among economists of his caliber. “Far too optimistic about the U.S. coming to its senses regarding sensible cryptocurrency regulation,” he wrote.” There is something sincere and subtly resentful about that line after reading it twice. The market wasn’t correct, he wasn’t saying. He claimed that bitcoin filled the gap left by the system’s lack of rationality.

He claims that bitcoin’s hold on the world’s black market, which he values at about $20 trillion, was something he truly underestimated. That is a sizable portion of the financial industry. It’s a huge, dimly lit economy that operates on the periphery of every major nation, and bitcoin, which is stateless, borderless, and hard to track when used carefully, has proven to be quite beneficial to it.Rogoff wrote, “This demand puts a floor on its price,” directing readers to his recently released book, Our Dollar, Your Problem, in which he purports to go into great detail about this. From a man who once wrote off bitcoin as practically worthless, this is an incredible admission.

However, Rogoff didn’t end there. He went farther—into what feels like genuinely provocative territory, the kind of observation that usually results in people either nodding vigorously or shifting the topic. He cited what he described as a “blatant conflict of interest” between regulators who, in his opinion, have been in possession of cryptocurrency valued at hundreds of millions, if not billions, of dollars while also being in charge of monitoring it.

It is unsettling and difficult to ignore the implication that some of the individuals in charge of determining bitcoin’s regulatory fate had compelling financial incentives to allow it to expand unchecked.

The extent of that criticism and the particular individuals Rogoff is referring to are still unknown. However, it seems like he’s pointing to a systemic issue rather than a few bad actors—a gradual institutional capture, the kind that doesn’t make news until much later. It is questionable if that framing is completely fair. Even the most astute observers are occasionally taken aback by markets, and a correlation between regulatory laxity and individual holdings does not always imply causation.

However, Rogoff’s mea culpa didn’t exactly win over those who support bitcoin. The response from that camp was summed up with characteristic bluntness by Anthony Pompliano, a vocal and persistent supporter of bitcoin, who claimed that Rogoff had blamed everyone but himself and still didn’t understand what bitcoin really is. However, it’s important to remember that dismissing a Harvard economist and former IMF chief just because his price call was incorrect is a form of intellectual shortcut in and of itself.

Rogoff is not abandoning his main issue. He continues to think that governments will eventually take decisive action against cryptocurrencies’ ability to facilitate financial crime and tax evasion. He thinks they will have to. Timing is crucial in markets, so that’s the question. For the past seven years, Bitcoin has solidified its position in wallets, balance sheets, ETF products, and public perception. Any regulator would have a lot of ground to recover from that.

As you watch this entire story play out, you get the impression that both sides are partially correct, but neither wants to acknowledge it. Regarding the cost, Rogoff was mistaken. However, the structural issues he brought up in 2018—illegal use, lax regulations, and a lack of meaningful oversight—remain. It appears that they were recently valued at $112,000 per coin.