Author of Skin in the Game: Bitcoin is a good idea but most investors can’t understand its nuances
According to a tweet by Nassim Taleb, author of “Skin in the Game”, Bitcoin is a good idea. Still, almost all Bitcoiners are total idiots, because most Bitcoin investors don’t understand the nuances of a cryptocurrency like Bitcoin.
Nassim Taleb, university professor and author of Black Swan
Taleb is a vocal critic of banks who called legal crooks amidst worsening economic and political crises in his home country of Lebanon.
Bitcoin is a good idea, but …
Taleb was exchanging posts with self-described “Bitcoin maximalist” Giacomo Zucco. He challenged Taleb’s views on imposing central planning by bureaucrats and politicians with “no skin in the game” as the best risk management strategy. Although he doesn’t think much about the cryptocurrency community, he believes that cryptocurrencies are a good idea.
1) I explain in #SkinintheGame scale transformations: Bitcoin is a good idea but almost all bitcoiners are total idiots, can’t get nuances beyond fortune cookies.
2) My idea is (fractal) State is needed ONLY for systemic tail risks, not messing w/daily life. Same as medicines. https://t.co/xHBJb341Ux
— Nassim Nicholas Taleb (@nntaleb) June 21, 2020
The origin of Bitcoin lies in freedom. And initially, the earliest BTC adopters (Roger Ver, Erik Voorhees, and others) saw this cryptocurrency as a tool to decentralize government and maximize political freedom. Yet Taleb’s criticism was directed at a Twitter user – who accused him of referring to Austrian-British economist Friedrich Hayek to justify the imposition of global central planning by bureaucrats and politicians. Because the government was only needed for systematic tail risks such as natural prosper.
However, not everyone agrees with Taleb. Quite a lot of people think Crypto Twitter might have skewed his perception of Bitcoiners. And most of them are not loyal liberals, which is why it is unreasonable to generalize the whole community.
Most Bitcoin users (by head count, not by net worth) aren’t on twitter and probably aren’t even libertarians. However, successfully contributing to Bitcoin requires adversarial thinking, and being overly paranoid about government is harmless, perhaps a feature, in _that_ context.
— Sjors Provoost (@provoost) June 21, 2020
Despite the push of many countries to create central bank digital currencies, there are many in the crypto community that sees Bitcoin as a way to separate from traditional financial facilities. And more than that, BTC is considered the safe-haven asset on par with gold. However, this hypothesis does not seem to be true when the recent COVID-19 pandemic did not make Bitcoin better.
Read more:
- Institutional Traders Were Net Short 1,822 Bitcoin, Suggesting They See The Downside In The Coming Weeks And Months
- While The Trump Administration Refused To Provide Regulatory Framework For Cryptocurrency, Now China Controlling Bitcoin Mining