1/ I was sitting in the Salt Lack City airport two weeks ago and opened the Instapaper app on my phone to read a few articles while I was waiting for my flight to board.
2/ I was just tucking into my Wendy's Cobb salad (surprisingly good btw) when I opened an article by Paul Krugman, an economist who writes a regular op-ed column for the New York Times.
3/ He had published a piece called "Transaction Costs and Tethers: Why I’m a Crypto Skeptic." There are a lot of good reasons to be a crypto skeptic and I often find dissenting opinions to be the most enlightening so I started reading through.
4/ Krugman opened with his own version of monetary history and preceded to explain why cryptocurrency was a "cutting-edge technology to set the monetary system back 300 years."
5/ There was a certain hubris and lack of epistemic modesty in the writing that had caused me to start aggressively stabbing the little pieces of chicken in my salad (not recommended).
6/ Monetary history and how money works is a subject open to many interpretations. Similar to other complex topics, the only thing I think you can know for sure is that no one really knows for sure what the right narrative.
7/ What is the fundamental disagreement between economists like Krugman and cryptocurrency enthusiasts? And which view does the evidence support?
8/ I wrote a piece exploring these questions for @tokendaily. Check it out: tokendaily.co/blog/cryptocur…
9/ Still thinking through some of the arguments in here, so feedback is welcome.
