[2019-05-06] Joseph Stiglitz: 'We should shut down the cryptocurrencies'

[e-coinomist]

Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel-Prize winning economist, says cryptocurrencies should be shut down. He worries that they enable illicit activity by making money transactions less transparent.

Still, he sees the value in digital payments systems and supports electronic use of government-backed currencies like the dollar.

"I've been a great advocate of moving to an electronic payments mechanism. There are a lot of efficiencies. I think we can actually have a better regulated economy if we had all the data in real time, knowing what people are spending," he says.

https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2019/05/02/joseph-stiglitz-we-should-shutdown-the-cryptocurrencies.html

People like him probably are the number one reason why shutdown resilience has been implemented in the first case. Oh, and mixers, of course.

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[buwaytress]

No need to blame people like him. He's a Nobel Laureate, so even if we think he's wrong, or he blabs his mouth, at least we should concede he probably has a lot more sound number-crunching to back up his claims than most other experts. Besides, he's an old-school economist, so of course he thinks like this, how else should we expect him to react to Bitcoin?

Lest we forget, Bitcoin is a direct attack on the status quo. Don't let all the corporate and banking overtures towards blockchain fool you. They should, rightly so, be worried about Bitcoin.

[Carlton Banks]

lol

[CryptoBry]

No need to blame people like him. He's a Nobel Laureate, so even if we think he's wrong, or he blabs his mouth, at least we should concede he probably has a lot more sound number-crunching to back up his claims than most other experts. Besides, he's an old-school economist, so of course he thinks like this, how else should we expect him to react to Bitcoin?

Lest we forget, Bitcoin is a direct attack on the status quo. Don't let all the corporate and banking overtures towards blockchain fool you. They should, rightly so, be worried about Bitcoin.

His comment about cryptocurrency doe snot merit any weight. Not unless he won the Nobel prize with his work with something related to cryptocurrency. He is against cryptocurrency yet he is favoring digital payments and there is a little disconnect here. Digital payments can also be used for illegal activities just like the use of the fiat money. Should we now abolish the fiat money because majority of illegal activities are conducted using them? Old school people are expressing their fear of change just like Warren Buffet. This can be something they are not fond of and they could not fully fathom for now...so yeah we just take people like Joseph and his conviction with some grain of salt.

[NeuroticFish]

"I've been a great advocate of moving to an electronic payments mechanism. There are a lot of efficiencies. I think we can actually have a better regulated economy if we had all the data in real time, knowing what people are spending," he says.

I wonder if Visa/Mastercard are paying for his advertising.

Old school economists don't understand coins that are not infinite supply. And humans are by nature afraid of what they don't understand, and in their mind it becomes associated with evil.
One would expect Nobel Prize winners be more open minded... 

Interesting that Gold is OK, banknotes are OK, although both are less traceable than crypto currencies, but crypto is not OK although he claims to advocate electronic payments.
History shows that humans have always been ingenious in finding ways to improve trade. People that want that will always evade the tracing of their "money", whether they use crypto or not.

A Nobel Prize winner should know that. And then why this? Does he believe that all of us are stupid and we'll simply go by his words? Maybe...

[hugeblack]

Stop listening to any news from CNBC regarding cryptos.  
Why are "personal opinions" considered news when it comes to cryptos?
This man supports the central institutions so he would be contrary to any idea that speaks of decentralization, not to mention the reasons.

[bustedsynx]

Stop listening to any news from CNBC regarding cryptos.  
Why are "personal opinions" considered news when it comes to cryptos?
This man supports the central institutions so he would be contrary to any idea that speaks of decentralization, not to mention the reasons.

Correct. It actually never fails. The mainstream news  is usually the last entity to spot a new uptrend in anything technology. Although, no major tv network said "Bitcoin is dead." I guess you can take that as a toned-down rhetoric by nocoiners.

[shamc]

If he wants a fully transparent payment system then get rid of cash and force everyone to use digital payments with all transactions recorded on a public ledger

[Betwrong]

Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel-Prize winning economist, says cryptocurrencies should be shut down. He worries that they enable illicit activity by making money transactions less transparent.

Still, he sees the value in digital payments systems and supports electronic use of government-backed currencies like the dollar.

"I've been a great advocate of moving to an electronic payments mechanism. There are a lot of efficiencies. I think we can actually have a better regulated economy if we had all the data in real time, knowing what people are spending," he says.

https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2019/05/02/joseph-stiglitz-we-should-shutdown-the-cryptocurrencies.html

Don't we already have a better regulated economy? I think we do. In North Korea. And we had many of such economies in the past in the Communist Bloc. Guess what? It didn't work. And it isn't working in North Korea today either as people are starving there, GDP per capita takes 178th place in the world. It's mind boggling that such acclaimed economist as Joseph Stiglitz seemingly doesn't know that free market is the only answer.

[Naida_BR]

Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel-Prize winning economist, says cryptocurrencies should be shut down. He worries that they enable illicit activity by making money transactions less transparent.

Still, he sees the value in digital payments systems and supports electronic use of government-backed currencies like the dollar.

"I've been a great advocate of moving to an electronic payments mechanism. There are a lot of efficiencies. I think we can actually have a better regulated economy if we had all the data in real time, knowing what people are spending," he says.

https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2019/05/02/joseph-stiglitz-we-should-shutdown-the-cryptocurrencies.html

People like him probably are the number one reason why shutdown resilience has been implemented in the first case. Oh, and mixers, of course.

These guys that have only as an argument the illicit trading piss me off.
Like we don't have any illicit activity with the ordinary cash fiat money. In blockchains everything is transparent and you can track and connect the dots that lead to the user that initiated the transaction, so his argument is invalid.

[Carlton Banks]

Don't we already have a better regulated economy? I think we do. In North Korea. And we had many of such economies in the past in the Communist Bloc. Guess what? It didn't work

think about this though:

Stiglitz is representing the antithesis to "Road to Serfdom" here

The central argument in "Road to Serfdom" was that one organisation can't possibly know every little detail that is relevant to economic planning; there are too many details, known by too many people, and those details are constantly changing. Ergo, total ecomomic planning is doomed to failure, and so it proved in the eastern bloc.

Fast forward to the internet age: we willingly give away a huge amount of the information that a central planner needs to institute "perfect communism". Hayek's determination was right in the 20th century, but the people of the 21st century (and rogues such as Joseph Stiglitz) are determined to prove it wrong.

• Google AI scans the vast majority of email, because if you're not using Gmail, you're sending mail to someone that is using Gmail
• Google AI scans every site map, and helps you their friends by steering you towards the "correct" website
• Facebook is one huge marketing vacuum, with real names of real people, their real relationships, their real interests (and dislikes)
• Amazon is almost the whole internet. Almost every website runs on an AWS server

If anyone thinks living in a world where FANG are basically the defacto government of everything, then...

Stop.
Using.
These.
Companies.

Please.

We can prove Stiglitz wrong, by depriving "perfect" central planning of the oxygen it needs to breathe: stop giving away information

[Vladdirescu87]

He doesn't understand cryptocurrencies at all and it doesn't matter that he is Nobel prize winner. Less transparent than fiat? Really?)

[Carlton Banks]

He doesn't understand cryptocurrencies at all

It's difficult to believe that you care about this. You constantly post very low quality articles to this news section, and all this achieves is a decrease in the signal to noise ratio

If you think it's important that people understand cryptocurrencies, please post content that is of a decent standard to this news sub

[1Referee]

If he wants a fully transparent payment system then get rid of cash and force everyone to use digital payments with all transactions recorded on a public ledger

In most modern economies that's already the case. Dozens of trillions of dollars are being transferred from one bank account to another every single day.

It's quite shocking how locally I have noticed that more and more shops no longer accept cash, and the part that shocks me even more is that people don't seem to care at all. All I hear them say is that they don't mind the shift from cash to cashless because they don't use cash anyway. If people are so easy to shift over to a completely centralized economy, we can only expect things to become worse.

[Theb]

IMF and World Bank Launch 'Learning Coin' to Explore Cryptocurrency

Well at least the World Bank (which he previously have worked for as a Chief Economist) and the IMF is taking a different route against what he stands for. Recently the World Bank together with the IMF have launched an event within their organization to help them understand blockchain and the crypto industry all together. People like him must learn to accept that it's not the currency's fault that illegal transactions are happening its all the people that takes advantage of the system, instead of him advocating ways to shut a whole industry down he should just have suggested/encouraged the government to have a regulation to work around with it which I think would be a win-win scenario for everyone.

[pixie85]

Somebody should tell him that you can't shut down bitcoin.

He's worried that there's no transparency in crypto and you really can't be more transparent than blockchain. Normal people can't follow transactions of the world elite but they can if that world elite uses Bitcoin. At least they will never know when their addresses are connected with the real people. Cash is more shady.

[Betwrong]

Don't we already have a better regulated economy? I think we do. In North Korea. And we had many of such economies in the past in the Communist Bloc. Guess what? It didn't work

think about this though:

Stiglitz is representing the antithesis to "Road to Serfdom" here

The central argument in "Road to Serfdom" was that one organisation can't possibly know every little detail that is relevant to economic planning; there are too many details, known by too many people, and those details are constantly changing. Ergo, total ecomomic planning is doomed to failure, and so it proved in the eastern bloc.

Fast forward to the internet age: we willingly give away a huge amount of the information that a central planner needs to institute "perfect communism". Hayek's determination was right in the 20th century, but the people of the 21st century (and rogues such as Joseph Stiglitz) are determined to prove it wrong.

• Google AI scans the vast majority of email, because if you're not using Gmail, you're sending mail to someone that is using Gmail
• Google AI scans every site map, and helps you their friends by steering you towards the "correct" website
• Facebook is one huge marketing vacuum, with real names of real people, their real relationships, their real interests (and dislikes)
• Amazon is almost the whole internet. Almost every website runs on an AWS server

If anyone thinks living in a world where FANG are basically the defacto government of everything, then...

Stop.
Using.
These.
Companies.

Please.

We can prove Stiglitz wrong, by depriving "perfect" central planning of the oxygen it needs to breathe: stop giving away information

I've never thought about it this way. I mean, I've been aware of dangers of being constantly monitored, especially after reading Harari's books, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow in particular. The following words by him would challenge anyone's mind, I guess.

"What will happen to society, politics and daily life when non-conscious but highly intelligent algorithms know us better than we know ourselves?"

But I've never thought it could lead to a centrally planned economy.

Now I'm thinking, a motto for the 21st century can be

If you support free market economics, don't support FANG!

[Slow death]

he gave his opinion on cryptos, that's a right he has, but that does not mean that people should take what he's saying seriously. But if the news channels on bitcoin take seriously what he says then he will feel someone relevant in the crypto world and will always tell you what he thinks about cryptos