Can Bitcoin go to Zero
Could Bitcoin go to zero? In the strict, academic sense—sure. Any asset that trades in a free market can be bid down to nothing if everyone walks away at the same time. But in the real world, with real people who use it, build on it, mine it, and hold it, the odds of Bitcoin hitting literal zero are vanishingly small. You’d have to unwind one of the strongest, most distributed, most antifragile networks on earth. That’s a tall order.
Think about what “zero” actually requires. It’s not a bear market or an ugly headline. It’s not a 70% drawdown or some exchange blowing up. We’ve seen all of that many times. Zero would mean a total collapse in global demand—no miners anywhere, no buyers anywhere, no developers anywhere, and no one left who values a censorship-resistant, non-sovereign form of money. It would mean the people who use Bitcoin to move value across borders under hostile regimes suddenly stop needing that freedom, and the millions who store savings outside of politician-controlled currencies decide—overnight—that political promises are good enough. That’s fantasy.
“But what about a fatal bug or a hacker?” Bitcoin is open-source and battle-tested. If a serious flaw shows up, the fix process is public and fast. Consensus software has been improved for over a decade by engineers who don’t need permission to ship patches. Bitcoin’s incentives also protect the network: miners want block rewards to be worth something, holders want sound money to keep working, and businesses want their customers to keep transacting. When incentives align, problems get solved.
“What about governments banning it?” Some already tried. The network routed around them. For zero to happen through policy, you’d need coordinated, airtight, long-term enforcement in nearly every country, across every ISP, cloud, home miner, and hardware wallet—forever. Meanwhile, a single pair of people anywhere on earth with internet and electricity can still trade sats. That’s the power of permissionless money: it doesn’t beg for approval, it just works.
The “miner death spiral” is another scary story that falls apart on contact with reality. If miners drop off, difficulty adjusts down, making it easier and cheaper to mine the next block. The system breathes. It doesn’t require perfect conditions; it requires time and a couple of honest participants. Bitcoin has both.
There are real risks: savage volatility, long winters where price bleeds and headlines gloat, regulatory whiplash, custody failures, and the small but nonzero chance of a serious consensus bug. If you buy Bitcoin with leverage, park it on a sketchy exchange, or size your position so big you can’t sleep, you can create your own personal zero. That’s not Bitcoin’s fault; that’s operator error.
So no, I don’t lose sleep over “zero.” I worry about something else: people selling their future for comfort today, trusting the same institutions that watered down their savings and then called the dilution a policy success. Bitcoin is the exit ramp—a monetary standard that doesn’t care who’s in office or what promises get made. If you believe freedom is worth defending, you don’t ask whether sound money can go to zero; you ask whether you’re ready to hold through the noise and act like a responsible steward of your own wealth.