Despite being hyped in expensive Super Bowl ads,
cryptocurrency is now having a difficult moment. As the New York
Times reports, “the crypto world went into a full meltdown
this week in a sell-off that graphically illustrated the risks of
the experimental and unregulated digital currencies.” One of
cryptocurrency’s most vocal skeptics is Nicholas Weaver,
senior staff researcher at the International Computer Science
Institute and lecturer in the computer science department at UC
Berkeley. Weaver has studied cryptocurrencies for years. Speaking
with Current Affairs editor-in-chief Nathan J. Robinson, Prof.
Weaver explains why he views the much-hyped technology with such
antipathy. He argues that cryptocurrency is useless and
destructive, and should “die in a fire.”
I can’t say I learned anything particularly novel from this interview, but Weaver’s cogent arguments and descriptions of how cryptocurrency works gave me confidence that I wasn’t missing anything. There just isn’t any there there other than burning an unconscionable amount of electricity.
So the stock market and the bond market are a positive-sum game.
There are more winners than losers. Cryptocurrency starts with
zero-sum. So it starts with a world where there can be no more
winning than losing. We have systems like this. It’s called the
horse track. It’s called the casino. Cryptocurrency investing is
really provably gambling in an economic sense. And then there’s
designs where those…
