Taleb on Bitcoin: an insurance policy against Orwellian future

Nassim Taleb, a world-famous philosopher, statistician and the author of Black Swan and Antifragile writes big thoughts about bitcoin in a way that you cannot hear from normal financial analysts and strategists. His main point can be found crystallied in the last two paragraphs:

"Finally, Bitcoin will go through hick-ups. It may fail; but then it will be easily reinvented as we now know how it works. In its present state, it may not be convenient for transactions, not good enough to buy your decaffeinated expresso macchiato at your local virtue-signaling coffee chain. It may be too volatile to be a currency, for now. But it is the first organic currency."

"But its mere existence is an insurance policy that will remind governments that the last object establishment could control, namely, the currency, is no longer their monopoly. This gives us, the crowd, an insurance policy against an Orwellian future."

Okay, for a person who takes cryptocurrencies seriously and goes beyond to respect the underlying philosophy of distributed solutions and empowerment of individuals there seems to be nothing surprising. However, Taleb is a popular and respected philosopher in many practical and logical issues. These libertarian-minded statements related to a hot blockchain application should make people think big for a change.

Additionally, the deepest analytical comment in my point of view is that one about Hayek and distributed knowledge: "It looks like we do not even need that thing called knowledge for things to work well. Nor do we need individual rationality. All we need is structure."

""Which is why Bitcoin is an excellent idea. It fulfills the needs of the complex system, not because it is a cryptocurrency, but precisely because it has no owner, no authority that can decide on its fate. It is owned by the crowd, its users. And it has now a track record of several years, enough for it to be an animal in its own right.""

I have covered the same issue distantly when I wrote about blockchain applications and different qualities of trust that will be needed in any case towards expertise, communities, networks etc.

The referred Nobel prize laureate economist Friedrich von Hayek (1899-1992) from the Austrian school of thought is famous for his literature on business cycles, society, classical liberalism, spontaneous order and the role of information in economic order. With his mentor Ludwig von Mises, Hayek participated in the famous economic calculation debate against socialist intellectuals. These economists were able to foresee the fate and problems of planned economies before they even took off during the 20th century.

An additional curiosity: Hayek also wrote a book "Denationalisation of Money", which is literally about private currencies. No wonder that Hayek has inspired many educated people in the cryptocurrency scene.