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Yeah, I mean... what am I supposed to do when dudez come out saying things like this?
Kenneth Rogoff, celebrated Harvard economist, stirred the Bitcoin hive with a salty half-apology. Even after bitcoin 12x'd since his doomsday call, rather than trying to learn about Bitcoin's value, he doubled down — and blamed Trump and criminals for his error!
Rogoff’s excellent book, This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly, and especially the freely available data behind the research for dozens of countries over hundreds of years, was a godsend during my university years. I learned so much from him.
When I finally met Rogoff in 2018 or so, it was a total “kill your idols” moment. He had just released his unfathomably stupid book The Curse of Cash — about how we should ban cash because criminals… and cash also makes monetary policy transmission worse and negative interest rates more difficult to impose. I was trying to explain to him the virtue of competitive note issuance and monetary freedom. To my shock, he was sputtering nonsense about free banking and falsities about U.S. banking history, let alone the past monetary arrangements of Canada, Scotland, or Sweden, of which he knew nothing.
I have lost almost all of my respect for legacy academics; we definitely need new institutions of (higher) education. Bitcoin is for anyone, but not everyone, and people get bitcoin at the price they deserve.

For all I care, Rogoff can join the likes of Elizabeth Warren at the back of the line.

Earning a PhD gives you (or can) a fine appreciation for how little experts should be presumed to know.
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Dunno if that was worth six years of my life
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Probably not for that. I really enjoyed being a grad student though. If it paid better, I might never have left.
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should ban cash because criminals
What us the line of reasoning here? Like, a normal, non criminal thing can be used by bad people, therefore no one should use the thing? How do such people not see that it applies to everything?
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It’s easy to not see things when your livelihood depends on not seeing them.
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yes... non-surveilled money transactions ALLOWS for all these drug trades and money laundering and guns blah-blah, so we shouldn't have it.
Unlike, I dunno kitchen knives, there's no downside since regular people don't suffer from a ban on cash (whereas they would from banned knives or banning cars etc).
How's that for a strongman?
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There is no reasoning. That's the genius of socialists. They get to say whatever they feel will work best for the circumstances. I expect that eventually they'll settle on the conclusion not that Bitcoin itself is bad, but that only government agencies should be allowed to use it.
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This is what my wife says every time I mention someone using this line of argument. Its lazy and dumb to anyone that is thinking outside of the subject area. I think it boils down to the fact that people so close to something often can't remove the lens that cloud their thinking.
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These guys care so much about what money criminals use, but when it comes to enforcing actual crimes that affect communities directly, they seem to go silent.
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THE MOST IMPORTANT THING I LEARNED AT OXFORD WAS THAT YOU CAN HAVE A PHD AND STILL BE AN IDIOT.
Love this quote
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