Nick Szabo  🔑

https://twitter.com/real_vijay/status/999068870869635073?s=19 …

Ability to articulate an argument is ancillary. True test of price forecasters is if they survive/profit over the long term acting on their predictions. If a debate arose between heliocentric and "geocentric" astronautical engineer, just see who creates a functional satellite.

I'm respectful of economists if they've even bothered to research Bitcoin's market signal in the past tense: supply, demand, the normal things economists are supposed to research when they see a strong market signal.

Exactly. I've been particularly disappointed in modern Austrian economic scholars who had the tools to understand the emergence of #Bitcoin yet missed the most important monetary innovation in a thousand years (exceptions are you, Saif and Konrad Graf)https://twitter.com/real_vijay/status/1032509406196379648?s=19 …

Early understanding of the value of Bitcoin involved a very rare combination of certain advanced parts of computer science with nondogmatic knowledge of deep monetary history. No surprise this combination was and is scarce in our age of hyperspecialists and ideologues.

Reminds me of this classic passage of yourshttps://twitter.com/real_vijay/status/1160054756649271297?s=19 …

Agreed. It cries out for one but it won't get one. Cowardly mob!

I have one. Have tweeted about it a lot. Saf and many Bitcoin investors have some. But of the many other professional or professorial economists I've seen talking about Bitcoin, even lame attempts at a fundamental explanation of this strong market signal seem few and far between.

I think the problem is that most economists are trained in modern theoretical models and almost absolutely zero economic history. I think most modern economists would profit greatly from reading “Money and Man” by Elgin Groseclose.

I think most economists are technocrats who view money as a tool to be used to manipulate the economy and can't fathom that both money and the economy can function without their guidance.

Indeed. They have a mechanistic view of the economy. Not an organic view. They see monetary policy as a lever that can be pulled/adjusted to reach definite outcomes.

The study is a bit skewed. You can't compare apples with oranges...The markets you are comparing bitcoin with have decades of history.... I would suggest to wait 20 years before making these types of comparison....

#Exponential #growth cannot be sustained for decades and your line will most likely over time get closer to the average of the other markets you are displaying on your chart.

No doubt. Both return & volatility are likely to decline in tandem. But main point of the tweet is that when normal economists see such a strong market signal, their presumption is to assume it reflects genuine supply and demand, and to work on research to find what those are.

In other words, my tweet is focused on past tense explanation for a strong market signal that has already happened, not future tense prediction.

In those terms, I agree.