FT Alphaville — a daily news commentary service created by the Financial Times — has been slammed on X after issuing a spiteful apology to Bitcoiners as the asset soared to $100,000 on Dec. 5.
The op-ed — published on the same day — was seen as a tongue-in-cheek apology to those who chose not to invest in Bitcoin BTC
$97,529 since FT’s first article on June 6, 2011, when Bitcoin was trading at $15.90.
”We’re sorry if at any moment in the past 14 years you chose based on our coverage not to buy a thing whose number has gone up. It’s nice when your number goes up,” said Bryce Elder, city editor of FT’s op-ed section, Alphaville.
“We’re sorry if you misunderstood our crypto cynicism to be a declaration of support for tradfi, because we hate that too.”
Since June 2011, FT Alphaville has staunchly argued Bitcoin to be a “negative-sum game” that is “chronically inefficient” as a means of exchange and “compromised” as a store of value.
FT Alphaville has also viewed Bitcoin’s price as an “arbitrary hype gauge that’s disconnected from any utility,” Elder noted.
Elder stressed that FT Alphaville continues to “stand by every single one of those posts.”
The so-called “apology” didn’t go down well with the crypto community.
One commenter on FT Alphaville’s post on X called it a “Cope-Pology,” while another described it as a “faux apology.”
“Imagine being so wrong and still having this lack of humility,” another commented.
FT Alphaville opinion writers have attacked Bitcoin from essentially every angle, including its pseudonymous creator, Satoshi Nakamoto, who was described as a “reckless” doctor overprescribing drugs by a former United States Federal Reserve risk examiner in 2014.
Mark Williams argued Satoshi built a poorly designed Bitcoin supply schedule that fails to factor in the “ebbs and flow” of economic cycles.
“It ignores the ebbs and flow of economic cycles – a reckless approach that is the equivalent of a doctor giving penicillin to every patient without first checking whether they are suffering from infection, depression or mania.”
Despite Bitcoin’s rise to $100,000, it still boasts an army of critics — most notably Berkshire Hathaway’s Warren Buffett, JPMorgan’s Jamie Dimon and financial commentator Peter Schiff — who incorrectly predicted that Bitcoin would never hit $100,000 in November 2019.
