American Economist Set To Debunk Crypto At US Congress Hearing Today

A renowned American economist is all set to deliver his testimony today at the US congress hearing, on 11th October, today. His 30-page testimony is apparently going to be a debunking of cryptocurrency and blockchain.

The economist in question is Dr. Nouriel Roubini. Also known as “Dr. Doom” for predicting the 2007-2008 housing bubble crash. The hearing will commence in the U.S. Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs, and the agneda for the hearing is “Exploring the Cryptocurrency and Blockchain Ecosystem.” Roubini’s testimony will be a counterpart to Peter Van Valkenburgh’s statement, Coin Center’s director of research.

Roubini, opens his testimony with a compariosn between Bitcoin’s past price data and the financial bubbles of the past eras: “Tulip-mania, the Mississippi Bubble, the South Sea Bubble.” He goes on to state that the crypto “bubble” that emerged in 2017 was caused because “clueless retail investors” were experiencing the FOMO (fear of missing out).

He further states:

“Actually calling this useless vaporware garbage a “s**tcoin” is a grave insult to manure that is a most useful, precious and productive good as a fertilizer in agriculture.”

Bitcoin’s scalability, it being a poor store of value and consuming too much energy, its high transaction fees and weak security are some of the issues that Roubini wishes to bring infront of the hearing committee.

He also made claims about Bitcoin’s inequitable distribution, which he substantied by referring to a 2014 Business Insider report which stated something along the lines of his own analogy on North Korea.

“[W]ealth in crypto-land is more concentrated than in North Korea, where the inequality Gini coefficient is 0.86.”

For those wondering what the Gini index is, it is a measure of distribution which allows one to evaluate economic inequality in a particular country or region. It has 0 assigned to perfect equality, and 1 to unmitigated inequality.