This year, much of the policy debate has centered on the idea of spot Bitcoin ETFs.
Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and Tina Smith, D-Minn., to send Fidelity a letter challenging the decision, pointing to Department of Labor guidance that warns of the risks such a move, and questioning whether Fidelity’s other activities — it has dabbled in crypto mining and offers crypto investments to institutional investors — create a conflict of interest.
Retirement accounts represent huge pools of investment capital that could boost crypto markets — but are also among the most “vanilla” investment products out there, highly accessible and also strictly regulated for consumer protection.
As it happens, Fidelity’s digital assets group has been one of the most prominent proponents of the view that Bitcoin, in particular, is extremely valuable.
It is not associated with the swagger of maverick hedge fund managers, let alone the disruptive online ethos of cryptocurrencies.
In his paper, Taleb argues that Bitcoin is too price-volatile to work as a currency and that competition between fiat currencies along with traditional financial instruments provide sufficient opportunities to hedge against inflation.
Taleb also invokes his favored “Lindy” concept to rebut the idea that Bitcoin is like digital gold: Precious metals like gold have been valuable for millennia, so by Lindy’s Law, we can expect they will remain valuable for centuries to come.
The paper takes it as a given that digital assets are valuable, and points out that by the standards of digital assets, Bitcoin is the Lindy option, as it was invented first and still exists.
In the months since Taleb’s manifesto first published, Bitcoin has roughly doubled, before losing all of those gains, and then some, but the lack of a true collapse looks like a point in Fidelity’s favor.
The authors of the Fidelity paper, Chris Kuiper and Jack Neureuter, assured me that their use of antifragile and Lindy was not intended as a response to Taleb.
Taleb said he is no apologist for the existing banking system, either.
In the meantime, the rhetorical volleys over Bitcoin’s value will continue to ricochet from here, and our expectations about who will argue, where and how will be continuously defied.
We must ensure Americans continue to benefit from the important information that only local broadcast, radio and newspaper outlets can provide.
The bipartisan Journalism Competition and Preservation Act would allow local news outlets – including radio and television stations and newspapers – to come together to negotiate with Big Tech for compensation for access to their original content.