The crypto market today got a new advocate. The intellectual world was very harsh on the cryptocurrencies from the beginning given its potential to upset the financial structural arrangements centers around the banking sector. The arrival of Bitcoin threatens this sector by creating a whole new dimension to money transfer without the fiat of government.
In an article published in Medium, Mr. Nassim Nicholas Taleb lauded the arrival of Bitcoin as something innovative that the world has not seen in the last 100 years especially with regards to transactional arrangements which forms the backbone of human economic activities. Mr. Taleb chides at the class of macroeconomic experts who are completely dumbfounded given the complexity through which the crypto world operates. He calls the current financial institution who manage the global capital flows in deference to their government a perfect monoculture which was needed to be broken. Bitcoin did just that.
The intellectual inspiration for the Bitcoin is laid at the feet’s of the intellectual giant, Frederick Hayek. Taleb argues that expertise doesn’t work very well in organic reality. It can’t concentrate on a complex system and is distributed. This notion of distribution of knowledge is an anti-elitist and anti-expertize, which is why the status quo intellectuals of the Paul Krugman ilk are so much distraught by the crypto rush.
Taleb argues that even knowledge or individual rationality is not needed to work this new domain. Only a structure managed by crowds, not by any government is sufficient to turn the tables. He compares the heightened rationality of the centralized systems with the wisdom of the crowd where the latter brings heightened efficiency much to the chagrin of the former. Thus the Marxian vs. Aristotelian approach works in the favor of Aristotle here. Zero-intelligence crowd can trump the apparatchik style governance.
This is the strength of Bitcoin according to Taleb. It can’t be owned by the government in the same way it owns the gold which has effectively neutralize the inherent value of the gold transactions. The guardians of the state are upon it. But who will guard the guardian? The answer is no one. But Bitcoin is not owned by any custodian which is why it is anti-elitist and revolutionary.
The idea that the government can’t fully control the objective assessment of valuable economic transactions gives the democratic masses an insurance policy in against an Orwellian future, Taleb concurs. Taleb always emphasized risk-taking and contrarian thinking as an asset which was the principal thesis of his magnum opus The Black Swan.
The arguments are convincing on political, moral and philosophical grounds.
In short, Libertarianism rocks.
