🤌 Harvard Humbled
FIRE BTC #44 - Bad bitcoin takes from Ivy League elites
In 2018, Harvard economist Kenneth Rogoff went on CNBC and declared with confidence that bitcoin was “a lot more likely” to fall to $100 than to ever reach $100,000. We didn’t have to wait too long to see how this played out: Rogoff was wrong by three orders of magnitude.
You might think being so spectacularly off would spark some reflection. Maybe a reassessment of assumptions. Maybe even a humbling recognition that bitcoin is something he hadn’t understood. Instead, Rogoff resurfaced this week to explain why his prediction missed: not because he was wrong (of course), but because he merely underestimated the stupidity of the world at large!
What a perfect example of why the elite academic class continues to misunderstand bitcoin. They’d rather preserve their intellectual ego than grapple with a system that exposes the fragility of their worldview.
🥊 Rogoff rebuttal
Rogoff’s reasoning for dismissing bitcoin boiled down to three claims:
It was mostly for criminals
Governments would regulate it into irrelevance
Without illicit use, it had no meaningful utility
None of those have aged well.
Governments didn’t ban bitcoin — they’re embracing it. The price has now spent more than 100 days above $100,000 and is held by corporations, sovereigns, and millions of individuals globally. And to add insult to Rogoff’s injury, his own institution — Harvard — just disclosed a $100 million+ allocation to BlackRock’s bitcoin ETF.
But the most revealing part of Rogoff’s critique is the one he probably thought was his strongest. He argued that bitcoin was “widely used in the $20 trillion global underground economy,” as if that was a fatal flaw. It’s actually a great proof of concept.
The very traits that make bitcoin valuable for those outside the banking system — permissionless access, cashlike settlement, borderless and censorship-resistant — are the same traits that make it powerful for the rest of the world.
Critics love to say “bitcoin isn’t money because nobody uses it in transactions.” But people do — when and where it’s the best tool for the job: remittances, bypassing sanctions, cross-border trade, escaping broken currencies.
Fiat users obsess over the medium-of-exchange role because their local money is so bad as a store of value. Day-to-day use of dollars to buy groceries is the only frame they have for “what money is,” and nobody with any sense saves using dollars.
But bitcoin excels at both: a superior store of value and a functioning medium of exchange.
Rogoff thinks the underground economy undermines the argument for bitcoin, when in reality, it validates it.
🎓 Why the elites can’t see it
If Rogoff were just one economist with a bad take, it would be easy to laugh and move on. But he represents a broader pattern. Many of the most credentialed, highly educated professionals — MBAs, Wall Street analysts, Ivy League professors — consistently dismiss bitcoin.
Jesse Myers nails the explanation for this pattern in his essay Why the Yuppie Elite Dismiss Bitcoin. He argues that belief in bitcoin depends not just on intelligence, but also on a willingness to question the system itself. Bitcoin maximalists tend to score high on both. But the “yuppie elite” live in a different quadrant: they’re extremely smart, but they also have extremely high trust in the system.
That trust is what blinds them. Their whole careers have been built on the assumption that the system works: that governments, central banks, and monetary authorities are ultimately competent and benevolent. Questioning that premise is very uncomfortable. To truly understand bitcoin, they’d have to accept that the system they’ve dedicated their lives to is fragile, extractive, and unsustainable. That’s a leap few yuppie elites are willing to make.
So when they see bitcoin being used successfully in places or contexts they don’t inhabit — emerging markets, dissident movements, the “underground” economy — they don’t interpret that as proof of strength. They rationalize it away as a flaw. Better to preserve their worldview than confront the fact that their Harvard diplomas don’t grant them immunity from monetary reality.
💡 No credentials needed
Rogoff is just one name in a long list of Ivy League elites who’ve been humbled by bitcoin. The bigger story is that bitcoin doesn’t wait for their approval. Adoption is happening from the bottom up and the top down: dissidents and savers, corporations and sovereigns, even the supposedly “sophisticated” allocators like university endowments.
Bitcoin thrives not because elites endorse it, but because reality forces them into it. Step by step, balance sheet by balance sheet, they eventually capitulate. Harvard may not admit it in the classroom, but their endowment already voted with $100 million in capital. And Harvard isn’t going to be the last.
Bitcoin doesn’t care about credentials, academic pedigrees, or the smartest-guy-in-the-room posturing. Reality is the ultimate rebuttal.
I created a short satirical video bringing the yuppie elite persona to life, in the form of Chad Ledger. Check it out, and let me know what you think. 😆
The lesson for the rest of us is simple: you don’t need a Harvard degree to understand bitcoin. You just need the humility to see what’s right in front of you.
That’s it for this week — thanks for reading!
Until next time,
Trey ✌️