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0 CommentsNassim Taleb, the “Black Swan” author and past Bitcoin fan, published his view degrading it. In his words, the coin “can be neither a long or short term store of value (its expected value is no higher than 0).”
The author of the “Black Swan” and several bestsellers on finance and risk, as well as an erstwhile Bitcoin supporter, Nassim Taleb, has posted on his blog Sunday a draft paper explaining his view on that cryptocurrency.
“In spite of the hype, Bitcoin failed to satisfy the notion of ‘currency without government’ (it proved to not even be a currency at all),” an outspoken trader and stock expert writes in “Bitcoin, Currencies and Bubbles.”
With his special style, Taleb says further that Bitcoin “can be neither a long or short term store of value (its expected value is no higher than 0), cannot operate as a reliable inflation hedge, and, worst of all, does not constitute, not even remotely, a tail protection vehicle for catastrophic episodes.”
His mind has changed dramatically since 2017, when Taleb wrote the foreword for the book of the economist Saifedean Ammous “The Bitcoin Standard,” which made cryptocurrency a new type of valid money.
Then Taleb saw Bitcoin as “an excellent idea. It fulfills the needs of the complex system… because it has no owner, no authority that can decide on its fate. It is owned by the crowd, its users. And it now has a track record of several years, enough for it to be an animal in its own right.”
Ammous and Taleb’s relationship has since publicly deteriorated. Taleb has deleted his Medium post with the foreword and made his Twitter account private, meaning if you are not among his followers, you would need his permission to see his posts.
In return, Ammous, who can be as sarcastic as Taleb, responded to his ex-colleague’s paper very briefly: “CRY HARDER.”
You may judge Taleb’s arguments for yourselves by reading his full draft paper on CoinDesk.
