Robert Shiller, the winner of the 2013 Nobel Prize in Economics, has recently softened his stance on Bitcoin. While still perceiving it as a bubble, he now believes it may ”be with us for a while”.
Shiller previously spoke out on his view that Bitcoin was representative of the cryptocurrency market as a whole, in that they were an economic bubble. He appears now to have a slightly more positive outlook on the future of Bitcoin, however.
Speaking with CNBC, Shiller said: ”I’m interested in Bitcoin as a sort of bubble. It doesn’t mean that it will disappear, that it’ll burst forever. It may be with us for a while”.
While he was keen to comment that he was not entirely dismissive of the idea of cryptocurrencies, he noted his belief that the popularity of the concept was more of a psychological trend than something that could be explained by a computer science department.
Influenced by politics
Shiller went on to discuss the political element of Bitcoin often neglected by economists, referring to a significant fraction of society that simply no longer trusted the government. For these people, part of the appeal of Bitcoin was that the government was not involved in its creation. Rather, it was developed by a qualified computer scientist.
As Shiller put it, ”It’s a great story for today’s markets”.
There are indeed a number of self-proclaimed libertarians that follow cryptocurrencies, as they believe it has the power to reduce unnecessary government intervention in peoples economic lives.
Yale University currently enrolls Shiller as professor of economics. He was one of the only major economists to correctly predict the housing crisis bubble in the US.
The value of Bitcoin is steadily recovering from its depreciation at the beginning of this year. The value of one Bitcoin at the time of writing stands around USD 8,150, after reaching just shy of USD 20,000 in December of last year.
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