# Bitcoin hitting £90,000 proves the sceptics have officially run out of arguments
The people who called Bitcoin a tulip bubble in 2017 have not apologised. They won't. But £90,000 per coin means we don't need them to.
This isn't a moment for smugness — it's a moment for clarity. Bitcoin crossed £90,000 this month and the arguments that once felt reasonable now feel embarrassing. Not because the price is high. Because every specific prediction made against Bitcoin has failed, one by one, on a documented timeline.
The arguments are dead. Let's bury them properly.
The "no intrinsic value" argument went first. Gold has intrinsic value because we decided it does. The pound has intrinsic value because the government says so. Bitcoin has intrinsic value because 50 million wallets with non-zero balances say so. Consensus is value. Always has been.
Then came "governments will ban it." They tried. China banned it repeatedly — 2017, 2019, 2021. Bitcoin didn't care. El Salvador made it legal tender in 2021. The EU pushed MiCA regulation through in 2024 and ended up creating a framework that legitimised the asset class rather than killing it. The UK's Financial Conduct Authority spent years building its own crypto registration regime. Regulators blinked. Bitcoin won that argument.
The "it's only used by criminals" line lasted longest. It was always statistically weak — Chainalysis consistently showed illicit activity accounting for well under 1% of Bitcoin transactions — but it sounded convincing to people who didn't want to look at the data. Now that BlackRock, Fidelity, and a dozen sovereign wealth funds hold Bitcoin directly, that argument has retired itself. No one's calling the Norwegian Government Pension Fund a money launderer.
What actually happened
Bitcoin ETFs got approved in the United States in early 2024. That opened the floodgates for institutional money that had been sitting on the sidelines. The April 2024 halving cut the block reward from 6.25 BTC to 3.125 BTC. Supply tightened. Demand didn't.
By the time we hit 2025, you had sovereign-level buying from Gulf states, continued accumulation from corporate treasuries, and retail interest that never actually went away — it just got quieter while the institutions moved in. That's the structure that carried us here.
£90,000 isn't a spike. It's the result of a multi-year structural shift in who holds Bitcoin and why.
The British conversation has been particularly slow
The UK has a specific problem here. Our financial press spent years treating Bitcoin scepticism as a sign of sophistication. Being dismissive was the respectable position. That cost a lot of ordinary people an extraordinary opportunity.
Working-class savers who put £500 into Bitcoin in 2020 when it was under £10,000 have turned that into over £4,500. That's not a lottery win. That's a verifiable return on a decision made with available public information. The same people who got told crypto was a scam were never warned that their savings account was paying 0.1% interest while inflation ran at 10%.
The scepticism was never evenly applied. That's worth saying plainly.
What this doesn't mean
£90,000 doesn't mean Bitcoin has no risk. It does. Volatility remains real. Regulation can still shift. A major exchange failure — we remember what FTX did to sentiment in 2022 — can still crater prices short-term.
It also doesn't mean every altcoin is vindicated. Most of them aren't. The 2021 bull run produced thousands of tokens that are now at zero. Bitcoin's track record is uniquely clean compared to the wider market.
But none of that is an argument against Bitcoin itself. It's an argument for understanding what you own before you buy it.
Our verdict
The sceptics had a reasonable position in 2013. They had a defensible one in 2017. By 2020 it was getting shaky. In 2026, at £90,000, the position has collapsed entirely.
Bitcoin is not going away. It is not a fad. It is not a Ponzi scheme. It is the best-performing asset of the last decade.
We don't need anyone to admit they were wrong. The price does that for us.
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