Rhetorical style should never distract from the content of someone’s arguments. So when I heard that Nouriel Roubini testified to the U.S. Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs on the cryptocurrency and blockchain ecosystem, I decided to peruse his testimony and reflect on it.His testimony makes an extensive number of critical points on the Bitcoin and cryptocurrency ecosystem. In this article, I want to set out a defense of Bitcoin against them. Importantly, I have not attempted to critically assess each and every single point he makes. Instead, I will focus my discussion on those areas of his testimony which I think are most important to defending Bitcoin. I offer no extensive defense for the cryptocurrency ecosystem in general because I am, to a substantial extent, in agreement with Roubini. Though there are certainly some projects of technical and economic value outside of Bitcoin, in my view, it is mostly Bitcoin that is of value and, therefore, what specifically needs to be defended against his claims. With regard to the “enterprise blockchain” ecosystem, as Roubini rightly notes, the word “blockchain” in this context is usually somewhat of a misuse of the term, and the initiatives in the enterprise ecosystem currently labeled as such generally have little to do with Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies. This is not to say that these enterprise initiatives have no value and are complete ...
