By: Wes Messamore
The Humble Libertarian
2018's epic correction of the speculative bubble fueling Bitcoin's meteoric price rise the year before has given Nouriel Roubini–– a fmr. senior economist for the Clinton Administration–– another occasion to indulge in one of his favorite past times, bashing Bitcoin.
But this time Roubini's taking it further than calling Bitcoin "bulls***," as he did this May; he now feels safe saying Bitcoin is down for the count, tweeting:
"With BTC down almost 80% from peak (from 20K to ~4K)... this crypto bubble went bust for good."
But as libertarian economist Jeffrey Tucker taunts in an article on Forbes: "Write A Bitcoin Obituary Now, Before It's Too Late."
Tucker makes two great points:
"The market capitalization of crypto is 5% higher now than this date last year. That's a bit lower than the average historical return on stocks of 7%. Still, it’s not bad for a bear market. It’s a great return for the year that has been called “an asset bust for the record books.”
To be sure, my data series is selective. It excludes the wild December runup, a time when the lines at bitcoin ATMs were around the block. Buying at the top and holding would have been … regrettable.
You can read countless stories of how so many people have been suckered into a bubble and ruined their lives by investing in various crypto assets. People use this event as a way of saying that crypto is nothing but a shiny object signifying nothing."
Those people might be right about some private currencies, but not about Bitcoin, which is obviously far more than merely a token that people have arbitrarily agreed to use as money.
Bitcoin is a network architecture that has generated a massive public record of verifiable accounts and transactions using the largest civilian or military deployment of strong cryptography in human history, and a brilliant methodology for creating something digital that cannot be copied (a bitcoin).
The economic value of something like that is hard to overstate, and the many potential useful applications for it in the economy of the digital era are only beginning to dawn on us.
Many valuable new technologies leave an investment bubble in the wake of their development and market adoption, as an early rush of enthusiasm fuels over investment, which is exactly what happened with the NASDAQ bubble and the Dot Com crash and burn, but I don't remember hearing so many people saying there wouldn't be an Internet anymore, or that it wouldn't continue to be an incredibly valuable part of the economy.
99Bitcoins has a now famous Bitcoin Obituaries list with, at the time this blog was posted, 329 obituaries for Bitcoin and the price of a bitcoin at the time the death knell was sounded, going all the way back to when a bitcoin could be had for pennies.
Roubini's recent dance on the purported grave of Bitcoin has been added to the list and will no doubt live forever in ignominy.
This article was first published on my website: The Humble Libertarian
