Economist Nouriel Roubini, also known as Dr. Doom because of his overly pessimistic views on financial outcomes, took aim at cryptocurrencies yesterday, labelling 90% of them as a scam.
With all that’s going on in the cypto world, from exchange crashes to masive fraud cases, it would be easy to buy into that idea. After all, cryptocurrency lacks something we humans value greatly – tangibility. Put simply, we’ve got nothing to hold in our hands. Cash is good. Gold is good. We can hold it, put it in vaults and wallets, and the more we have of it, the bigger the pile the is and the more it weighs. That makes sense in our caveman brains.
But crypto doesn’t work like that. It’s simply numbers on a screen. And yes, nowadays as we move closer to a cashless society traditional currencies are also becoming just numbers on a screen that we move around with apps and charge cards too, but we know at the back of our minds we could walk into our bank and they could give us all that money in a nice, big heavy pile of cash, and our caveman brain would be happy.
So is he right? Is this all just a big Ponzi scheme, devised by a brilliant mind who immediately vanished and left us to throw our money at this idea hoping to get more back than we put in?
Are there truly whales? Huge investors who suddenly appear, pump vast sums into a cryptocurrency then disappear from view again? Are people like Michael Saylor just…
