Dr Doom fights the Bitcoin boofheads

Good stuff at Bloomie where Nouriel Roubini brings the pain to the BTC madmen:

A cryptocurrencies panel at the Milken Institute Global Conference was more like a cryptobrawl — no punches but a barrage of barbed comments.

“All this talk of decentralization is just bullsh*t,” said Nouriel Roubini, an economist known as Dr. Doom for predicting the chaos of the 2008 financial crisis.

“Everything you just said is irrelevant,” shot back Alex Mashinsky, a blockchain entrepreneur who was an early developer of the Voice over Internet Protocol standard.

…Mashinsky said crypto assets will let people bypass banks.

“You’re just making stuff up,” Roubini replied.

Roubini is right. The paradox at the heart of crypto is very simple. If it fails it fails. If it succeeds and “bypasses banks” then it will be regulated out of existence.

That is the one absolute certainty about crypto.

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About the author

David Llewellyn-Smith is Chief Strategist at the MB Fund and MB Super. David is the founding publisher and editor of MacroBusiness and was the founding publisher and global economy editor of The Diplomat, the Asia Pacific’s leading geo-politics and economics portal. He is also a former gold trader and economic commentator at The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, the ABC and Business Spectator. He is the co-author of The Great Crash of 2008 with Ross Garnaut and was the editor of the second Garnaut Climate Change Review.