It’s Not Crypto That’s the Problem Here

Nouriel Roubini, known to the financial press as “Dr. Doom” outlines in his new book “Megathreats: The Ten Trends That Imperil Our Future, And How To Survive Them,” some of the problems with cryptocurrency, from his perspective. That doesn't sit well with Joakim Book, a research fellow at the American Institute for Economic Research and contributor to Bitcoin Magazine, HumanProgress.org and the Mises Institute.

Joakim Book writes of Roubini’s book that his problem isn’t crypto – in his article he focuses on Bitcoin but his points equally apply to cryptocurrency generically – that he’s really describing the inherent problems of the existing economic regime.

From Bitcoin Magazine:

What his new book does so well is outline the world’s many macroeconomic troubles. For five mesmerizing chapters, he describes the debt problems, the demographic impossibility that is the bankrupt Ponzi (sorry, “pension”) schemes of Western nations, the easy money disaster and the boom-bust cycle that it gives rise to. Stagflation in the 2020s did not come as a surprise to him, and he locates the blame precisely where it should be: “We poured massive amounts of money and fiscal stimulus into a financial and economic system already awash in cash and credit.” With a short-term view and politically-captured central banks, we get disastrously easy money because “that is what voters want and leveraged markets need to avoid crashing.”

He even comes down on the correct side of the 2022 blunder to use the dollar payment rails to sanction a G8 economy: “This sort of weaponizing of currency for the pursuit of national security goals is the latest frontier of the mission creep of central banks, starting with the Fed” (ignoring that the Federal Reserve doesn’t make sanction decisions).

As a rule, whatever Bitcoin’s flaws are — as a money, as a protocol, as a usable tool, as a community — it gets better, relatively speaking, when the incumbent monetary system gets worse. Whatever your position on Bitcoin was three, five or 10 years ago, you must look at it more favorably today: the monetary system in place has gotten so much worse, with inflation, anti-money-laundering bureaucracy, clown-world behavior and frozen accounts being just the worst offenders. All is not well in the world of money; that makes Bitcoin a more tempting prospect, all things equal.