The Skeptics A Tribute to Bold Assertions "We propose a global and morally mandatory heuristic that anyone involved in an action which can possibly generate harm for others, even probabilistically, should be required to be exposed to some damage, regardless of context."

N.N. Taleb & C. Sandis, "The Skin in the Game Heuristic for Protection Against Tail Events" Submit a link via GitHub Price data by CoinMetrics.io Last updated: September 23, 2020

Niels van der Linden - April 22, 2011 ($0.77)

Amateur economist, VforVoluntary.com

Daily Buy $1 Total Invested $3,443 BTC Balance 112.46896317 Current Value $1,150,928.59 Percent Change +33,328.07%

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Avery Pennarun - May 08, 2011 ($3.84)

Software engineer

Daily Buy $1 Total Invested $3,427 BTC Balance 105.70434107 Current Value $1,081,704.19 Percent Change +31,464.17%

See, a bitcoin rant is almost too over-the-top for me. Asking why I think bitcoin won't work is like asking why the sky isn't red. I mean, wait, you think it is red? You actually took that seriously? Oh boy. Where do I even start?



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Peter Schiff - June 20, 2011 ($17.50)

CEO, Euro Pacific Capital, Inc.

Daily Buy $1 Total Invested $3,384 BTC Balance 101.00940307 Current Value $1,033,659.48 Percent Change +30,445.49%

What [bitcoins] lack is their own fundamental intrinsic value. You can’t do anything with a bitcoin, other than trade it for something you want. So, intrinsically, the bitcoin itself has no value. It only has value as a medium of exchange so long as people are willing to accept it.



Tim Worstall - June 20, 2011 ($17.26)

Journalist

Daily Buy $1 Total Invested $3,384 BTC Balance 101.00940307 Current Value $1,033,659.48 Percent Change +30,445.49%

It’s difficult to see what the currency has going for it.



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Adrian Covert - August 09, 2011 ($8.02)

Journalist

Daily Buy $1 Total Invested $3,334 BTC Balance 97.29982710 Current Value $995,698.28 Percent Change +29,764.98%

The lulz were abundant. But frankly, it’s time for you to go. Farewell.



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Michael Calore - December 24, 2012 ($13.27)

Journalist

Daily Buy $1 Total Invested $2,831 BTC Balance 9.48253659 Current Value $97,037.64 Percent Change +3,327.68%

Then came the malware, the black market, the legal ambiguities and The Man. Today, you can't even use it to buy Facebook stock



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Patrik Korda - March 05, 2013 ($34.00)

Amateur trader

Daily Buy $1 Total Invested $2,760 BTC Balance 5.65314761 Current Value $57,850.35 Percent Change +1,996.03%

Thus, we have an answer before us: bitcoins are fiduciary media, or more specifically token money. From a monetary standpoint, as devised and formulated by Ludwig von Mises, they are on a par with the stuff you find at Chuck E. Cheese's.



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Heidi Moore - April 03, 2013 ($115.09)

Finance and Economics Editor, The Guardian US

Daily Buy $1 Total Invested $2,731 BTC Balance 5.15683352 Current Value $52,771.42 Percent Change +1,832.31%

Of course, in a rational world, none of that will be written, except perhaps as satire. Bitcoin's crash is less of a currency crisis than an opportune moment for internet wisecracks.



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Kurt Eichenwald - April 09, 2013 ($239.98)

Contributing editor, Vanity Fair

Daily Buy $1 Total Invested $2,725 BTC Balance 5.11619680 Current Value $52,355.57 Percent Change +1,821.31%

So, anyone out there buying Bitcoins at ridiculously inflated prices, please recognize the risk you are taking. You will likely lose everything.



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Justin Wolfers - April 11, 2013 ($84.46)

Economist, Brookings Institution

Daily Buy $1 Total Invested $2,723 BTC Balance 5.10565810 Current Value $52,247.73 Percent Change +1,818.76%

Robert McMillan - May 10, 2013 ($115.48)

Journalist

Daily Buy $1 Total Invested $2,694 BTC Balance 4.84479167 Current Value $49,578.20 Percent Change +1,740.32%

But in the end, the answer was obvious. The world’s most popular digital currency really is nothing more than an abstraction. So we’re destroying the private key used by our Bitcon wallet.



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Ian Bremmer - May 14, 2013 ($115.01)

Founder and President, Eurasia Group

Daily Buy $1 Total Invested $2,690 BTC Balance 4.81041495 Current Value $49,226.42 Percent Change +1,729.98%

"I would be very surprised if Bitcoin is still around in 10 years," said Bremmer, the founder and CEO of Eurasia Group, the world's largest risk consulting firm. He thinks that bigger players will enter the field and improve upon Bitcoin's weaknesses.



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David S. Evans - October 16, 2013 ($137.54)

Chairman of the Global Economics Group

Daily Buy $1 Total Invested $2,535 BTC Balance 3.34530444 Current Value $34,233.50 Percent Change +1,250.43%

I think there are two realistic directions the bitcoin ecosystem could go in. First, it could just implode and disappear if governments decide that virtual currencies cause too much harm and are too hard to regulate. Long-term investments in bitcoin would then go up in smoke. Second, it could continue as a virtual currency that is only used on the dark web with exchanges that are run by people willing to break the laws. The value of bitcoin would decline to whatever the illegal sector could support; regular investors wouldn’t be able to get their value from bitcoin unless they cashed it in with someone who wanted to do bad things.



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Emin Gün Sirer - November 03, 2013 ($214.13)

Professor, Cornell University

Daily Buy $1 Total Invested $2,517 BTC Balance 3.24583762 Current Value $33,215.63 Percent Change +1,219.65%

Joseph Weisenthal - November 06, 2013 ($264.61)

Executive Editor, Business Insider

Daily Buy $1 Total Invested $2,514 BTC Balance 3.23260676 Current Value $33,080.23 Percent Change +1,215.84%

Bitcoin? Nada. There's nothing keeping it being a thing. If people lose faith in it, it's over. Bitcoin is fiat currency in the most literal sense of the word.



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Kevin Rose - November 08, 2013 ($330.01)

Co-founder, Digg

Daily Buy $1 Total Invested $2,512 BTC Balance 3.22536071 Current Value $33,006.08 Percent Change +1,213.94%

Matthew O'Brien - November 21, 2013 ($589.24)

Journalist

Daily Buy $1 Total Invested $2,499 BTC Balance 3.19378635 Current Value $32,682.97 Percent Change +1,207.84%

In other words, Bitcoin is a Ponzi scheme libertarians use to make money off each other—because gold wasn't enough of one for them.



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Gary North - November 29, 2013 ($1,065.36)

Economist

Daily Buy $1 Total Invested $2,491 BTC Balance 3.18436805 Current Value $32,586.59 Percent Change +1,208.17%

Bitcoins will never achieve this. It is a mania going up. It will be a mania coming down. It will not increase the division of labor, because people will recognize it as having been a Ponzi scheme, and they will not again buy it. They will not use it in exchange. Companies will not sell goods and services based on Bitcoins. Bitcoins have to have stable purchasing power if they are to serve as money, and they will never, ever achieve stable purchasing power.



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Matthew Yglesias - December 02, 2013 ($1,000.49)

Executive Editor, Vox

Daily Buy $1 Total Invested $2,488 BTC Balance 3.18155185 Current Value $32,557.77 Percent Change +1,208.59%

My primary interest in Bitcoin is that I think it's a great platform for making jokes.



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Mark T. Williams - December 05, 2013 ($1,083.40)

Finance Professor, Boston University

Daily Buy $1 Total Invested $2,485 BTC Balance 3.17876084 Current Value $32,529.21 Percent Change +1,209.02%

Beware of Bitcoin (Cognoscenti from WBUR Boston NPR)

Once sellers outnumber buyers, prices will eventually drop below $10, erasing all gains. This price collapse will occur by the first half of 2014.



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Alex Payne - December 18, 2013 ($527.76)

Developer and Angel Investor

Daily Buy $1 Total Invested $2,472 BTC Balance 3.16304359 Current Value $32,368.37 Percent Change +1,209.40%

Bitcoin represents more of the same short-sighted hypercapitalism that got us into this mess, minus the accountability.



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Charlie Stross - December 18, 2013 ($527.76)

Author

Daily Buy $1 Total Invested $2,472 BTC Balance 3.16304359 Current Value $32,368.37 Percent Change +1,209.40%

TL:DR; the current banking industry and late-period capitalism may suck, but replacing it with Bitcoin would be like swapping out a hangnail for Fournier's gangrene.



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Edward Hadas - December 18, 2013 ($527.76)

Economics Editor, Reuters

Daily Buy $1 Total Invested $2,472 BTC Balance 3.16304359 Current Value $32,368.37 Percent Change +1,209.40%

Bitcoin Mania Heads Into the Endgame (NY Times Dealbook)

The electronic pseudocurrency has had a good run. Ideologues, speculators and scammers enjoyed the fun while it lasted. But now that the authorities are taking notice, the price has much further to fall.



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Brad DeLong - December 28, 2013 ($717.51)

Professor of Economics, U.C. Berkeley

Daily Buy $1 Total Invested $2,462 BTC Balance 3.14746875 Current Value $32,208.99 Percent Change +1,208.24%

You can either work doing something useful, or you can set up a botnet to mine BitCoins, or you can fork the code behind BitCoin and set up your own slightly-tweaked virtual cryptographic money network. Setting up a new, alternative network is really cheap. Thus unless BitCoin going can somehow successfully differentiate itself from the latecomers who are about to emerge, the money supply of BitCoin-like things is infinite because the cost of production of them is infinitesimal.



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Paul Krugman - December 28, 2013 ($717.51)

Nobel Prize-winning Economist

Daily Buy $1 Total Invested $2,462 BTC Balance 3.14746875 Current Value $32,208.99 Percent Change +1,208.24%

Bitcoin is Evil (The New York Times)

So far almost all of the Bitcoin discussion has been positive economics — can this actually work? And I have to say that I’m still deeply unconvinced. To be successful, money must be both a medium of exchange and a reasonably stable store of value. And it remains completely unclear why BitCoin should be a stable store of value.



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Lisa Kramer - January 15, 2014 ($830.47)

"Serious Economist"

Daily Buy $1 Total Invested $2,444 BTC Balance 3.12512947 Current Value $31,980.39 Percent Change +1,208.53%

Bursting the bitcoin bubble (The Globe and Mail)

As a Serious Economist, I had been happily ignoring the recent bitcoin frenzy, safe in the smug knowledge shared by all Serious Economists that the surge in bitcoin value is a bubble that will soon pop.



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Jamie Dimon - January 23, 2014 ($811.40)

President & CEO, JPMorgan Chase

Daily Buy $1 Total Invested $2,436 BTC Balance 3.11538457 Current Value $31,880.66 Percent Change +1,208.73%

"It’s a terrible store of value," Mr. Dimon said in an interview with CNBC. "It could be replicated over and over."



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Paul Singer - January 29, 2014 ($794.65)

CEO, Elliott Management Corporation

Daily Buy $1 Total Invested $2,430 BTC Balance 3.10778818 Current Value $31,802.93 Percent Change +1,208.76%

There is no more reason to believe that bitcoin will stand the test of time than that governments will protect the value of government-created money, although bitcoin is newer and we always look at babies with hope.



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Robert J. Shiller - March 01, 2014 ($560.18)

Nobel Prize-winning Economist

Daily Buy $1 Total Invested $2,399 BTC Balance 3.06092224 Current Value $31,323.33 Percent Change +1,205.68%

In Search of a Stable Electronic Currency (The New York Times)

The Bitcoin phenomenon seems to fit the basic definition of a speculative bubble — that is, a special kind of fad, a mania for holding an asset in expectation of its appreciation.



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Mark Cuban - March 09, 2014 ($640.58)

TV Actor, Shark Tank

Daily Buy $1 Total Invested $2,391 BTC Balance 3.04822785 Current Value $31,193.43 Percent Change +1,204.62%

I think as an encryption technology, [Bitcoin’s] great. I think as a transport mechanism, accounting of a transport mechanism, that it's unique and has a great opportunity in the future. I think it has no shot as a long term digital currency. [Would you buy any?] Yeah, I mean I'd look at it, but more as fun, you know? It's almost like buying and selling baseball cards, but there's definitely risk involved if you're looking at it to be a long term currency.



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Nouriel Roubini - March 09, 2014 ($637.38)

Professor of Economics, New York University

Daily Buy $1 Total Invested $2,391 BTC Balance 3.04822785 Current Value $31,193.43 Percent Change +1,204.62%

Warren Buffett - March 14, 2014 ($634.10)

Chairman & CEO, Berkshire Hathaway

Daily Buy $1 Total Invested $2,386 BTC Balance 3.04036699 Current Value $31,112.99 Percent Change +1,203.98%

"Stay away from it," he said, according to a transcript. "It’s a mirage basically."



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Anthony Watson & Halsey Minor - October 14, 2015 ($254.74)

CEO and Founder & Chairman, Uphold (formerly Bitreserve), respectively

Daily Buy $1 Total Invested $1,807 BTC Balance 1.23085199 Current Value $12,595.68 Percent Change +597.05%

Watson sounds even more negative on bitcoin. “I’ll be surprised if bitcoin is here in five years,” he has told Fortune. “The value of bitcoin isn’t the currency, but the technology. I think once the world becomes more accustomed and attuned to the platform of bitcoin, the noise will go away, and the currency will go away too.

[…]

Minor, too, predicts that bitcoin as a currency “will get destroyed.” He likens the coin’s current market cap—about $3.7 billion—to “an accounting mistake or rounding error that Bank of America makes.”



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Mike Hearn - January 14, 2016 ($429.24)

Lead Platform Engineer, R3CV

Daily Buy $1 Total Invested $1,715 BTC Balance 0.97724825 Current Value $10,000.47 Percent Change +483.12%

But despite knowing that Bitcoin could fail all along, the now inescapable conclusion that it has failed still saddens me greatly. The fundamentals are broken and whatever happens to the price in the short term, the long term trend should probably be downwards. I will no longer be taking part in Bitcoin development and have sold all my coins.



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Vivek Wadhwa - January 19, 2016 ($385.51)

Contributor, The Washington Post; Tryhard

Daily Buy $1 Total Invested $1,710 BTC Balance 0.96441335 Current Value $9,869.13 Percent Change +477.14%

Bitcoin did have great potential, but it is damaged beyond repair. A replacement is badly needed.



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Jeremy Allaire - November 17, 2016 ($744.86)

CEO, Circle

Daily Buy $1 Total Invested $1,407 BTC Balance 0.38012662 Current Value $3,889.95 Percent Change +176.47%

“Our view is that we’re still in the really early stages of the technology and its development,” said Allaire. “It’s highly unlikely that any of us will be using Bitcoin in five or ten years. In the same way that — how many of us use NCSA Mosaic or Netscape Navigator?”



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Timothy B. Lee - November 21, 2016 ($736.72)

Senior correspondent, technology and economics, Lead writer for "New Money", Vox Media

Daily Buy $1 Total Invested $1,403 BTC Balance 0.37473219 Current Value $3,834.75 Percent Change +173.33%

What went wrong? The Bitcoin community has been hampered by a dysfunctional culture that has grown increasingly hostile toward experimentation. That has made it difficult for the Bitcoin network to keep up with changing market demands...Bitcoin's larger problem may be that it just doesn’t solve any problems normal people have.



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Dan McCrum - January 03, 2017 ($1,034.34)

Editor, Financial Times

Daily Buy $1 Total Invested $1,360 BTC Balance 0.32132606 Current Value $3,288.23 Percent Change +141.78%

As a phenomenon bitcoin has all the attributes of a pyramid scheme, requiring a constant influx of converts to push up the price, based on the promise of its use by future converts. So the ultimate value for bitcoin will be the same as all pyramid schemes: zero.



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Raoul Pal - June 02, 2017 ($2,519.80)

Macro Strategist, GMI

Daily Buy $1 Total Invested $1,210 BTC Balance 0.19317022 Current Value $1,976.77 Percent Change +63.37%

Bitcoin was supposed to be a store of value, you couldn’t mess with the formula… and now they are talking about a ‘hard fork’ changing it? Even if they don’t change the formula, the fact that they could? That’s enough to say it’s not a long-term store of value.



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Howard Marks - July 26, 2017 ($2,522.70)

Co-chairman, Oaktree Capital

Daily Buy $1 Total Invested $1,156 BTC Balance 0.17182043 Current Value $1,758.29 Percent Change +52.10%

In my view, digital currencies are nothing but an unfounded fad (or perhaps even a pyramid scheme), based on a willingness to ascribe value to something that has little or none beyond what people will pay for it.



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Kenneth Rogoff - October 09, 2017 ($4,808.73)

Professor of Economics and Public Policy, Harvard University; Former Chief Economist, IMF

Daily Buy $1 Total Invested $1,081 BTC Balance 0.15218872 Current Value $1,557.39 Percent Change +44.07%

My best guess is that in the long run, the technology will thrive, but that the price of bitcoin will collapse.



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Al-Waleed Bin Talal bin Abdulaziz al Saud - October 23, 2017 ($6,018.02)

Citigroup shareholder

Daily Buy $1 Total Invested $1,067 BTC Balance 0.14964258 Current Value $1,531.34 Percent Change +43.52%

I just don't believe in this bitcoin thing. I think it's just going to implode one day. I think this is Enron in the making.



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Bill Harris - April 24, 2018 ($9,333.95)

Founder & CEO, Personal Capital; Former CEO of PayPal and Intuit

Daily Buy $1 Total Invested $884 BTC Balance 0.13005282 Current Value $1,330.87 Percent Change +50.55%

In my opinion, [Bitcoin’s] a colossal pump-and-dump scheme, the likes of which the world has never seen.



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Robert C. Merton - November 28, 2018 ($3,771.01)

Nobel Prize-winning Economist; Failed and bailed out co-founder, Long-Term Capital Management

Daily Buy $1 Total Invested $666 BTC Balance 0.09754067 Current Value $998.16 Percent Change +49.87%

The problem with bitcoin at the moment, despite Ohio, is just what its champions decry: It is not a government-controlled currency. And therefore, asks Merton, who is responsible for the value of our currency if tomorrow morning all the bitcoin screens go dark?



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Steven Mnuchin - July 24, 2019 ($9,725.66)

United States Secretary of the Treasury

Daily Buy $1 Total Invested $428 BTC Balance 0.04865078 Current Value $497.86 Percent Change +16.32%

"I can assure you I will personally not be loaded up on bitcoin" in 10 years, says Treasury Secretary Mnuchin #bitcoin pic.twitter.com/0J5acWQwRO — Squawk Box (@SquawkCNBC) July 24, 2019

I won't be talking about Bitcoin in 10 years, I can assure you that. […] I would bet in even 5 or 6 years I'm no longer talking about Bitcoin as Treasury Secretary. […] I can assure you I will personally not be loaded up on Bitcoin.



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Tendayi Kapfidze - January 01, 2020 ($7,170.63)

Chief Economist, LendingTree

Daily Buy $1 Total Invested $267 BTC Balance 0.03018528 Current Value $308.90 Percent Change +15.69%

“It’s a pyramid scheme,” LendingTree Chief Economist Tendayi Kapfidze tells Yahoo Finance. “You only make money based on people who enter after you. It has no real utility in the world.



“They’ve been trying to create a utility for it for ten years now. It’s a solution in search of a problem and it still hasn’t found a problem to solve.”



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