Nouriel Roubini: Bitcoin is not a hedge against tail risk: from FT. “Crypto has no income, no utility, no payment or other services. It isn’t even anonymous because the underlying blockchain technology makes it easy to trace payments. It is only a play on a speculative asset bubble, worse than tulip-mania as flowers had and still have utility. Its store of value against tail risks is unproven.”
Steve Hanke: “ Carl Menger, founder of the Austrian school of economics, formulated the process by which institutions are created and evolve. This has come to be known as spontaneous order, an order that is not consciously designed by anyone… Menger demonstrated that it was spontaneous order that gave rise to money. No one invented money. Instead, money emerged unplanned out of people’s attempts to improve their condition by moving away from bartering and engaging in indirect exchange via money…This brings us to the rise of cryptocurrencies. Lack of trust in central banks and national currencies set the stage for the arrival of private substitutes. While technology played its part in making cryptocurrencies feasible, it is the lack of trust in central banking that has paved the way for what might be a new spontaneous order.”
Ray Dalio: “Bitcoin looks like a long-duration option on a highly unknown future that I could put an amount of money in that I wouldn’t mind losing about 80% of.”