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”

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Last updated:

April 22, 2011 • $1.40

Niels van der Linden

Amateur economist, VforVoluntary.com

Daily buy
$1.00
Total invested
$4,844.00
BTC balance
112.51494252
Current value
$7,394,713.94
Percent change
152,557.18%

Archive link

May 8, 2011 • $3.85

Avery Pennarun

Software engineer

Daily buy
$1.00
Total invested
$4,828.00
BTC balance
105.75032042
Current value
$6,950,129.03
Percent change
143,854.62%
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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June 20, 2011 • $17.51

Tim Worstall

Journalist

Daily buy
$1.00
Total invested
$4,785.00
BTC balance
101.05538242
Current value
$6,641,568.03
Percent change
138,699.75%
It’s difficult to see what the currency has going for it.

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June 20, 2011 • $17.51

Peter Schiff

CEO, Euro Pacific Capital, Inc.

Daily buy
$1.00
Total invested
$4,785.00
BTC balance
101.05538242
Current value
$6,641,568.03
Percent change
138,699.75%
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.

August 9, 2011 • $9.80

Adrian Covert

Journalist

Daily buy
$1.00
Total invested
$4,735.00
BTC balance
97.34580645
Current value
$6,397,767.05
Percent change
135,016.52%
The lulz were abundant. But frankly, it’s time for you to go. Farewell.

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September 7, 2011 • $7.16

Paul Krugman

Nobel Prize-winning Economist

Daily buy
$1.00
Total invested
$4,706.00
BTC balance
94.28248331
Current value
$6,196,439.14
Percent change
131,571.04%
So to the extent that the [Bitcoin] experiment tells us anything about monetary regimes, it reinforces the case against anything like a new gold standard – because it shows just how vulnerable such a standard would be to money-hoarding, deflation, and depression.

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December 24, 2012 • $13.43

Michael Calore

Journalist

Daily buy
$1.00
Total invested
$4,232.00
BTC balance
9.52851594
Current value
$626,233.71
Percent change
14,697.58%
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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March 5, 2013 • $40.67

Patrik Korda

Amateur trader

Daily buy
$1.00
Total invested
$4,161.00
BTC balance
5.69912696
Current value
$374,558.37
Percent change
8,901.64%
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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April 3, 2013 • $131.38

Heidi Moore

Finance and Economics Editor, The Guardian US

Daily buy
$1.00
Total invested
$4,132.00
BTC balance
5.20281287
Current value
$341,939.59
Percent change
8,175.40%
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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April 9, 2013 • $230.68

Kurt Eichenwald

Contributing editor, Vanity Fair

Daily buy
$1.00
Total invested
$4,126.00
BTC balance
5.16217615
Current value
$339,268.86
Percent change
8,122.71%
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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April 11, 2013 • $82.90

Justin Wolfers

Economist, Brookings Institution

Daily buy
$1.00
Total invested
$4,124.00
BTC balance
5.15163745
Current value
$338,576.23
Percent change
8,109.90%

May 10, 2013 • $117.69

Robert McMillan

Journalist

Daily buy
$1.00
Total invested
$4,095.00
BTC balance
4.89077102
Current value
$321,431.55
Percent change
7,749.37%
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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May 14, 2013 • $107.87

Ian Bremmer

Founder and President, Eurasia Group

Daily buy
$1.00
Total invested
$4,091.00
BTC balance
4.85639430
Current value
$319,172.24
Percent change
7,701.81%
"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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October 16, 2013 • $138.33

David S. Evans

Chairman of the Global Economics Group

Daily buy
$1.00
Total invested
$3,936.00
BTC balance
3.39128379
Current value
$222,882.16
Percent change
5,562.66%
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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November 3, 2013 • $210.28

Emin Gün Sirer

Professor, Cornell University

Daily buy
$1.00
Total invested
$3,918.00
BTC balance
3.29181697
Current value
$216,345.00
Percent change
5,421.82%

November 6, 2013 • $263.21

Joseph Weisenthal

Executive Editor, Business Insider

Daily buy
$1.00
Total invested
$3,915.00
BTC balance
3.27858611
Current value
$215,475.44
Percent change
5,403.84%
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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November 8, 2013 • $333.75

Kevin Rose

Co-founder, Digg

Daily buy
$1.00
Total invested
$3,913.00
BTC balance
3.27134006
Current value
$214,999.21
Percent change
5,394.49%

November 21, 2013 • $720.76

Matthew O'Brien

Journalist

Daily buy
$1.00
Total invested
$3,900.00
BTC balance
3.23976570
Current value
$212,924.08
Percent change
5,359.59%
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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November 29, 2013 • $1,128.73

Gary North

Economist

Daily buy
$1.00
Total invested
$3,892.00
BTC balance
3.23034740
Current value
$212,305.09
Percent change
5,354.91%
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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December 2, 2013 • $1,040.81

Matthew Yglesias

Executive Editor, Vox

Daily buy
$1.00
Total invested
$3,889.00
BTC balance
3.22753120
Current value
$212,120.00
Percent change
5,354.36%
My primary interest in Bitcoin is that I think it's a great platform for making jokes.

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December 5, 2013 • $1,027.41

Mark T. Williams

Finance Professor, Boston University

Daily buy
$1.00
Total invested
$3,886.00
BTC balance
3.22474019
Current value
$211,936.57
Percent change
5,353.85%
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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December 18, 2013 • $526.12

Edward Hadas

Economics Editor, Reuters

Daily buy
$1.00
Total invested
$3,873.00
BTC balance
3.20902294
Current value
$210,903.60
Percent change
5,345.48%
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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December 18, 2013 • $526.12

Alex Payne

Developer and Angel Investor

Daily buy
$1.00
Total invested
$3,873.00
BTC balance
3.20902294
Current value
$210,903.60
Percent change
5,345.48%
Bitcoin represents more of the same short-sighted hypercapitalism that got us into this mess, minus the accountability.

Archive link

December 18, 2013 • $526.12

Charlie Stross

Author

Daily buy
$1.00
Total invested
$3,873.00
BTC balance
3.20902294
Current value
$210,903.60
Percent change
5,345.48%
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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December 28, 2013 • $715.85

Brad DeLong

Professor of Economics, U.C. Berkeley

Daily buy
$1.00
Total invested
$3,863.00
BTC balance
3.19344810
Current value
$209,879.99
Percent change
5,333.08%
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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January 15, 2014 • $841.09

Lisa Kramer

"Serious Economist"

Daily buy
$1.00
Total invested
$3,845.00
BTC balance
3.17110882
Current value
$208,411.81
Percent change
5,320.33%
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.

Archive link

January 23, 2014 • $810.92

Jamie Dimon

President & CEO, JPMorgan Chase

Daily buy
$1.00
Total invested
$3,837.00
BTC balance
3.16136392
Current value
$207,771.35
Percent change
5,314.94%
"It’s a terrible store of value," Mr. Dimon said in an interview with CNBC. "It could be replicated over and over."

Archive link

January 29, 2014 • $793.38

Paul Singer

CEO, Elliott Management Corporation

Daily buy
$1.00
Total invested
$3,831.00
BTC balance
3.15376753
Current value
$207,272.10
Percent change
5,310.39%
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.

Archive link

March 1, 2014 • $567.53

Robert J. Shiller

Nobel Prize-winning Economist

Daily buy
$1.00
Total invested
$3,800.00
BTC balance
3.10690159
Current value
$204,191.98
Percent change
5,273.47%
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.

Archive link

March 9, 2014 • $640.58

Mark Cuban

TV Actor, Shark Tank

Daily buy
$1.00
Total invested
$3,792.00
BTC balance
3.09420720
Current value
$203,357.67
Percent change
5,262.81%
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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March 9, 2014 • $640.58

Nouriel Roubini

Professor of Economics, New York University

Daily buy
$1.00
Total invested
$3,792.00
BTC balance
3.09420720
Current value
$203,357.67
Percent change
5,262.81%

March 14, 2014 • $628.31

Warren Buffett

Chairman & CEO, Berkshire Hathaway

Daily buy
$1.00
Total invested
$3,787.00
BTC balance
3.08634634
Current value
$202,841.04
Percent change
5,256.25%
"Stay away from it," he said, according to a transcript. "It’s a mirage basically."

Archive link

October 14, 2015 • $253.14

Anthony Watson & Halsey Minor

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

Daily buy
$1.00
Total invested
$3,208.00
BTC balance
1.27683134
Current value
$83,915.99
Percent change
2,515.84%
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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January 14, 2016 • $429.82

Mike Hearn

Lead Platform Engineer, R3CV

Daily buy
$1.00
Total invested
$3,116.00
BTC balance
1.02322760
Current value
$67,248.63
Percent change
2,058.17%
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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January 19, 2016 • $378.16

Vivek Wadhwa

Contributor, The Washington Post; Tryhard

Daily buy
$1.00
Total invested
$3,111.00
BTC balance
1.01039270
Current value
$66,405.09
Percent change
2,034.53%
Bitcoin did have great potential, but it is damaged beyond repair. A replacement is badly needed.

Archive link

November 17, 2016 • $735.32

Jeremy Allaire

CEO, Circle

Daily buy
$1.00
Total invested
$2,808.00
BTC balance
0.42610597
Current value
$28,004.56
Percent change
897.31%
“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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November 21, 2016 • $736.51

Timothy B. Lee

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

Daily buy
$1.00
Total invested
$2,804.00
BTC balance
0.42071154
Current value
$27,650.03
Percent change
886.09%
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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January 3, 2017 • $1,032.61

Dan McCrum

Editor, Financial Times

Daily buy
$1.00
Total invested
$2,761.00
BTC balance
0.36730541
Current value
$24,140.07
Percent change
774.32%
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.

Archive link

June 2, 2017 • $2,479.42

Raoul Pal

Macro Strategist, GMI

Daily buy
$1.00
Total invested
$2,611.00
BTC balance
0.23914957
Current value
$15,717.40
Percent change
501.97%
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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July 26, 2017 • $2,522.32

Howard Marks

Co-chairman, Oaktree Capital

Daily buy
$1.00
Total invested
$2,557.00
BTC balance
0.21779978
Current value
$14,314.25
Percent change
459.81%
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.

Archive link

October 9, 2017 • $4,777.53

Kenneth Rogoff

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

Daily buy
$1.00
Total invested
$2,482.00
BTC balance
0.19816807
Current value
$13,024.01
Percent change
424.74%
My best guess is that in the long run, the technology will thrive, but that the price of bitcoin will collapse.

Archive link

October 23, 2017 • $5,888.25

Al-Waleed Bin Talal bin Abdulaziz al Saud

Citigroup shareholder

Daily buy
$1.00
Total invested
$2,468.00
BTC balance
0.19562193
Current value
$12,856.68
Percent change
420.94%
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.

Archive link

April 24, 2018 • $9,652.21

Bill Harris

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

Daily buy
$1.00
Total invested
$2,285.00
BTC balance
0.17603217
Current value
$11,569.20
Percent change
406.31%
In my opinion, [Bitcoin’s] a colossal pump-and-dump scheme, the likes of which the world has never seen.

Archive link

November 28, 2018 • $4,208.48

Robert C. Merton

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

Daily buy
$1.00
Total invested
$2,067.00
BTC balance
0.14352002
Current value
$9,432.43
Percent change
356.33%
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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July 24, 2019 • $9,792.79

Steven Mnuchin

United States Secretary of the Treasury

Daily buy
$1.00
Total invested
$1,829.00
BTC balance
0.09463013
Current value
$6,219.29
Percent change
240.04%
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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January 1, 2020 • $7,170.63

Tendayi Kapfidze

Chief Economist, LendingTree

Daily buy
$1.00
Total invested
$1,668.00
BTC balance
0.07616463
Current value
$5,005.70
Percent change
200.10%
“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.”

Archive link

February 12, 2021 • $47,525.21

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Flaneur, or something like that

Daily buy
$1.00
Total invested
$1,260.00
BTC balance
0.03826798
Current value
$2,515.05
Percent change
99.61%

Archive link