Robert Shiller, the nobel prize winning economist, has yet again voiced caution about bitcoin and the crytpocurrency industry.
Talking to CNBC's “Trading Nation” on Tuesday, the Yale professor was asked whether he sees bitcoin facing extinction in the next 100 years. Offering an interesting perspective, he pointed out that:
“Bitcoin won't look anything like it is today. It will have a different name, if it exists. There will have been many hard forks changing it and changing it. And, it'll be a matter of dispute whether it exists or not.”
And, commenting on the price volatility of bitcoin, Shiller did concede that predicting the fate of the currency was difficult:
“but one scenario is that something like what happened after 2013 when bitcoin topped $1,000, and then lost 80 percent of its value. It looked like bitcoin was just fading away. It's so hard to predict these things.”
Although Prof. Shiller further explained that he didn’t mean to be dismissive of bitcoin, he nonetheless remarked that it “looks like a bubble,” although he acknowledged that “something good may come out of it.”
Bearish Economists
These latest comments are by no means the first from Shiller nor other respected economists on the fate of the cryptocurrency in recent weeks. Earlier in the month celebrated NYU economist Nouriel Roubini derided bitcoin as a “glorified excel spreadsheet,” while Shiller himself in April described bitcoin as a perfect example of “faddish human behaviour.”
Bitcoin has had a volatile couple of months recently seeing the large gains made in April mostly wiped out this month. At the time of writing bitcoin was trading at $7,330 according to CryptoCompare.
Featured Image Credit: “Robert Shiller – World Economic Forum Annual Meeting 2012” by “World Economic Forum” via Flickr; licensed under “CC BY 2.0”
