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Topic: Bitcoin is a bubble - Nobel Laureate in Economics (Read 4015 times)

legendary
Activity: 1232
Merit: 1195

Thanks, man! I just read the original article and then this piece - that's probably the lamest excuse I have ever heard.

Yeah. Very lame.

Quote
First, look at the whole piece. It was a thing for the Times magazine's 100th anniversary, written as if by someone looking back from 2098, so the point was to be fun and provocative, not to engage in careful forecasting; I mean, there are lines in there about St. Petersburg having more skyscrapers than New York, which was not a prediction, just a thought-provoker.

But the main point is that I don't claim any special expertise in technology -- I almost never make technological forecasts, and the only reason there was stuff like that in the 98 piece was because the assignment required that I do that sort of thing. The issues about Bitcoin, however, are not technological! Everyone agrees that it's technically very sweet. But does it work as money? That's a very different kind of question.

And the fact that people are throwing around my 98 quote actually shows that they don't get this point -- that they're confusing technology with monetary economics.

sr. member
Activity: 336
Merit: 250

Yeah, that's a hyperinflated ego pretending to fix past mistakes, but he can't. If you have read his 1998 article you can't notice if that was written with the perspective of a visitor from 2098. He should have made it explicit, specially when he is addressing such a big and diverse audience. So, that probably falls into the "lame excuses" realm. He was ambiguous enough in his article, but ambiguity does not make a false statement true.


Incredibly lame - there is no trace of irony or 2098 in this article. Just stupidity.

And if he wants to say so, his forecast about the internet was a social one (not a technological one). Nevertheless, it was a forecast. If he doesn't know, he shouldn't write about it.

I can't find any line about "St Petersburg having more skyscrapers than New York" in there.

Krugman saying that BTC will fail gives me more confidence in BTC.
sr. member
Activity: 336
Merit: 250

Thanks, man! I just read the original article and then this piece - that's probably the lamest excuse I have ever heard.
hero member
Activity: 868
Merit: 1000
If you have read his 1998 article

It has a good title "Why most economists' predictions are wrong" lol.
full member
Activity: 182
Merit: 100
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Have any other currencies (irl) seen a bubble effect? A revolutionary currency is quite different to the standard stock/share bubbles!
sr. member
Activity: 333
Merit: 250
Commander of the Hodl Legions

Yeah, that's a hyperinflated ego pretending to fix past mistakes, but he can't. If you have read his 1998 article you can't notice if that was written with the perspective of a visitor from 2098. He should have made it explicit, specially when he is addressing such a big and diverse audience. So, that probably falls into the "lame excuses" realm. He was ambiguous enough in his article, but ambiguity does not make a false statement true.

Here's another quote from that article, and it was stated before his "funny forecasts", so technically was serious about it:

"The raw power of computers has advanced at a stunning speed, but has this advance translated into a comparable improvement in their usefulness? Word processing, to take the most obvious example, hasn't fundamentally improved since the late '80s. And in the view of many people I know, WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS was actually better for their purposes than any of the bloatware that has followed."

Really? Word processors is all he can think about when talking about computing applications? Prob he could have also included the minesweeper in the predictions.  Grin. Then he goes and says that Silicon Valley has peaked, and he says it the year google was incorporated.

Fact is Nobel is not what it used to be, even medical doctors can school them... live

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jEmKIRqz9AI
legendary
Activity: 1666
Merit: 1057
Marketing manager - GO MP

Cryptocurrencies are an idea and Bitcoin an open source proof of concept.

It is free.



FTFY
legendary
Activity: 2156
Merit: 1131

Bitcoin is an idea and an open source technology.

It is free.

hero member
Activity: 868
Merit: 1000
full member
Activity: 238
Merit: 100
bitbitcoins.com
Yeah just like the Internet is a bubble, what loser uses Internet nowadays right!

well said !
sr. member
Activity: 365
Merit: 250
Bitcoin is a bubble - Nobel Laureate in Economics

Robert Shiller, 2013 Nobel Prize winner in Economics, and an expert in the nature of market excesses, has come down on bitcoin and said that the tremendous jump of the virtual currency was a 100 percent bonified “bubble”.

"It is a bubble, there is no question about it.... It's just an amazing example of a bubble," the Business Insider quotes Shiller, talking to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

http://rt.com/business/bitcoin-shiller-bubble-davos-127/

they give those to literally anyone these days...
legendary
Activity: 1666
Merit: 1057
Marketing manager - GO MP
The impact the fax machine had on business was pretty serious, in that way krugman was right.

Some of you weren't around in those early days of the (public) internet, but let me tell you on the height of the dotcom bubble so much of this bullshit was going on that krugmans quote entirely makes sense in that context. People claimed to be in a new paradigm where accounting and business models do not matter any more. It was an "idea guy economy"...



On the topic, you guys seem pretty mad about that, eh?
hero member
Activity: 727
Merit: 500
Minimum Effort/Maximum effect
It's a true quote, Metcalfe's law may be true, but it's just a theory to understand a particular phenomenon, which is part of a greater whole... the internet will stop growing, yes... but there is just so many of us, there are so many factors involved beyond the number of possible connections of a particular system, topic, or correlations; You can only apply it to each particular case one by one, all of them. There will always be things we will never know, so we will always have new things to spread, and it doesn't help that we can forget. He just had the timing wrong... and thought that costly communication infrastructure(Telephony) would ever be dismantled. If the possibility is inherently there... people will use it, a little or a lot, like economics we can't calculate all the factors that move a single stock... there are just too many and each is constantly changing dynamically; people, always in motion.

But to be fair the piece was about how things would look back to the now, as if it would be in 2098.
sr. member
Activity: 336
Merit: 250
Just like the whole internet...





If a nobel says it, it is true. word.

Lol, is that a true, actual quote?

And judging by what he is saying about BTC, he didn't even learn something from it!

I especially like the part of the statement in between the "-" because after all it's just there to make the whole sentence sound more respectable and academic. That part really doesn't add any meaning, ha ha!
hero member
Activity: 727
Merit: 500
Minimum Effort/Maximum effect
Humanity is a bubble. Smiley
That rose from the primordial ooze, a wart on the larger bubble known as life.

Man, if you look at things at a large enough time scale... everything is a bubble, It's just figuring out how stable those bubbles are. Smiley
It's all just ripples on the larger wave of technology. I agree with the idea that, he'll come around once he stops thinking just about
the economic aspects and realizes that it is a infrastructure, people are investing in the development of this technology called
Cryptocurrency. Plain and simple every dollar put towards this experiment is prolonging the life of the Brand, Bitcoin, and incentivizing
people to develop it anyway they can, now it's a movement, it's starting it's own wave, adding momentum to the larger bubble called
The Digital Revolution.
full member
Activity: 171
Merit: 100
cryptocurrencies are here to stay. no question about it. and  some technology aspect of bitcoin will live on forever (blockchain/ledger/opensourcemoney etc these concepts will live on)
but bitcoin which is now just one "brand" of cryptocurrency (although the first one ) is a total bubble.  bitcoins growth has  been  exactly the "bubbly ride" traders love..there's been at least 3 bubble pops where traders have been able to easily double up their stash. and big payout days on dumb money are still to come as more sheeples jump on board. rinse and repeat till there's no more sheeples to bleed dry.
baid were the first company to make television...other brands brought more innovation and took over ....the technology of television still lived ......
ibm was the first personal computer......other brands entered the market with more innovation and took over ..personal computers sdtill lived on...
myspace was the first social media....then other brands brought more innovation and took over (twitter/facebook)....social media still lives on....and myspace now is dead.
bitcoin was first cryptocurrency.....other cryptos are bringing innovation (PoS) and will take over (not saying which ones).....cryptocurrency will live on.....
member
Activity: 94
Merit: 10
Bitcoin seems like a bubble to mainstream economists because Bitcoin is meant to be a currency so it's meant to be spent but most people are buying them with the opinion they'll go up but for those who believe Bitcoin also represents a store of value and believe Bitcoin will eventually be a mainstream currency then it isn't a bubble, in fact it's very undervalued.

Also there's the fact that economists only care about consumption and they don't think money should be a store of value considering the amount of money they're willing to print to apparently save us, so of course it seems like a bubble to them.

They probably think gold is a bubble too because it's just shiny metal and most people aren't spending it or using it for electronics or fillings
legendary
Activity: 1789
Merit: 1008
Keep it dense, yeah?
I wonder what criteria need to be met to convince people that this isn't a bubble. I mean when does something stop being considered a bubble.

Will it no longer be considered a bubble when a certain handful of companies take BTC payments successfully? Or when x number of people use BTC? Or is it when the value stabilises (not for a long while)?

Bubble is a word for naysayers because they can't think of anything better or factual to slander BTC with. Bubbles aren't necessarily bad either and are to be expected with something so new.

Sure, I mean anything revolution must be considered a bubble under some estimation during its initial time. Whether it continues to develop or simply fizzles out would make people say "ah it wasn't a bubble after all" or "told you, it was a bubble all along" lol. During the potential "bubble" period it can only be speculated. All about hindsight I suppose.
global moderator
Activity: 4018
Merit: 2728
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I wonder what criteria need to be met to convince people that this isn't a bubble. I mean when does something stop being considered a bubble.

Will it no longer be considered a bubble when a certain handful of companies take BTC payments successfully? Or when x number of people use BTC? Or is it when the value stabilises (not for a long while)?

Bubble is a word for naysayers because they can't think of anything better or factual to slander BTC with. Bubbles aren't necessarily bad either and are to be expected with something so new.
full member
Activity: 168
Merit: 100

> 3. Ask him when he ever in his life invented something or had a vision about any technological disruption that changed the world.

Ever heard of the Case-Schiller index?  This guy also made it possible to insure against rapidly falling housing prices.  Robert Schiller is a great economist, with a proven track record of predictions in the real world, and also more innovation that the neckbeards posting shit about him.  No question.  He's also a decent human being.

I hope he is wrong about bitcoin.  The thing about Schiller is, he thinks everything is a bubble, so this is not terribly surprising.  Yes, he called the housing bubble and the tech bubble.  But he pretty much thinks everything is overvalued.  Wink

+1
absolutely great economist, very boring technical writing style though--- he doesn't think everything is bubble, just recently he said he is buying US stocks, for instance. He is very good at statistical analysis, perhaps he is not that familiar with the whole bitcoin phenomenon yet and will likely have to revise his opinion. Don't get angry folks, BTC is so disruptive to the whole value system of most economists, that it is very difficult for them not to fight the concept...
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