The word “cryptocurrency” is a misnomer because it isn’t a currency, according to Roubini.
Nouriel Roubini, an award-winning economist and known skeptic of Bitcoin (BTC), is confident that central bank digital currencies, or CBDCs, are the future of money.
According to Roubini, global CBDCs like the digital yuan are capable of replacing major financial services and cryptocurrencies in the near future. “They’re gonna be crowding out digital payment systems, or in the private sector, starting with cryptocurrencies that are not really currencies,” the economist said in a Nov. 7 interview with Yahoo Finance.
Roubini predicted that a CBDC-powered “revolution” is coming in as soon as in three years:
“So not only you don’t need crypto, you don’t even need Venmo. You don’t even need a bank account. You don’t even need the check. And the big revolution we’re gonna see in the next three years is gonna be central bank digital currencies.”
Furthermore, the world-known economist is confident that cryptocurrency itself is a “misnomer,” because a currency needs to provide a unit of account. “Nothing is priced in Bitcoin or any other cryptocurrency,” Roubini argued, claiming that crypto does not provide either a “single numerator,” or a “scalable means of payment.”
However, Roubini did admit that Bitcoin could serve as a store of value, which is a major function of money alongside a unit of account and a medium of exchange:
“It’s maybe a partial store of value, because, unlike thousands of other what I call shitcoins, it cannot be so easily debased because there is at least an algorithm that decides how much the supply of Bitcoin raises over time, because for most of those other ones, literally, is done ad hoc, and they’re being debased faster than what the Fed is doing.”
Roubini has also criticized decentralized finance, one of the major trends in the crypto market in 2020. “DeFi was vaporware from its onset,” the economist argued in late September 2020, adding that the industry is “totally faltering as blockchain was always the most over-hyped technology in human history.”
