“Dr. Doom” is back pounding the lectern and suggesting that cryptocurrencies are essentially worthless.
Speaking at the Salt conference in New York yesterday, Roubini referred to crypto in general as “the mother and father of all bubbles,” according to Adrian Zmudzinski’s reporting in Cointelegraph today.
In addition to this patronymically prolific pronouncement, Roubini said “cryptocurrency is totally a misnomer” since “to be a currency, you have to be a unit of account, valuable and a scalable means of payment.”
However, Zmudzinski’s story is also a tale of two ideologies in vital debate, as individuals like Michael Novogratz, Galaxy Digital CEO, are calling the battle for Bitcoin after recent market increases.
“The debate is over, bitcoin won,” Novogratz reportedly said. “It is now seen by people all around the world as a legitimate place to [store] their value.”
Many Bitcoin and cryptocurrency traders are well familiar with Roubini’s doom and gloom assessments of any coin at all. But when you scratch the surface of these arguments, which generally contend that cryptocurrency is worthless because it’s not backed up, many of us know in the back of our minds that fiat national currencies have some of the same limitations. In other words, money or any asset is only as good as the trust that’s behind it, especially for the U.S. dollar which is no longer physically backed by gold
In that sense, we can take Novogratz’ point as a compelling one – that market activity seems to have shown that people do trust Bitcoin.
In reality, you can set up a pro and con list with healthy assessments on either side of the ledger.
Cryptocurrencies and block chain can, in fact, facilitate fraud and crime – but they can also, in fact, facilitate greater transparency and security for finances.
They do have risks as decentralized platforms – but then they do also have benefits as decentralized platforms.
One of the big questions that we’re trying to answer in our daily reporting is how institutional plays factor into the market equation.
When we talk about the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission maybe greenlighting a Bitcoin ETF, or a national government using blockchain for central-bank activity, or a giant multinational corporation investing heavily in blockchain, what we’re demonstrating is that there is a snowballing movement toward critical mass where that kind of trust that investors and officials have is going to boost Bitcoin or some other cryptocurrency to new heights.
So as you assess remarks by Nouriel Roubini or Michael Novogratz or anyone else, do your research and make your own predictions. We’ll be bringing you in the news of the day as it relates to these very controversial and often volatile assets.
