Nouriel Roubini, an economist best known for his predictions of the 2008 housing bubble, and Peter Van Valkenburgh, Coin Center’s director of research, testified before the U.S. Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Community Affairs in a hearing on cryptocurrency and blockchain on October 11, 2018.“We need to sort through the static,” said Banking Committee Chair Idaho Republican Mike Crapo, describing a need to better understand both the opportunities and the challenges in cryptoland. The testimony comes at a time when bitcoin has lost two-thirds of its value since the beginning of the year and U.S. regulators are trying to figure out how to regulate thousands of ICOs that have flown in the face of decades old securities laws. Roubini wasted no time in firing off his salvos. He called crypto the “mother and father of all scams and [now busted] bubbles.” Among his list of other criticisms: blockchain is overhyped; Bitcoin cannot scale and it is not decentralized; only criminals and terrorists use bitcoin; crypto is a libertarian’s dream; and utility tokens will return us to the Stone Age. “Even the Flintstones knew better than crypto — they used clamshells as their own one currency,” he said, in one bewilderingly anachronistic statement. In stark contrast, Van Valkenburgh hailed bitcoin as “revolutionary” for its ability to function as a payment system without a trusted middleman. He referred to bit...
