TL;DR Breakdown
- Economist Steve Hanke says BTC has no value.
- Max keiser fires him for saying BTC has no value.
- Hank reveals why fiat is superior to Bitcoin.
An angry Bitcoin enthusiast, Max Keiser who wasn’t going to have negative sentiments about number one cryptocurrency, Bitcoin fired back at Steve Hank, a renowned economist.
Keiser tweeted that Hank and other economists in ten years would be unemployed after BTC must have rendered them obsolete.
“Economists hate the fact that #Bitcoin makes them obsolete. In another 10 yrs, there’ll be none employed anywhere. They are witch doctors casting their last dying spells, he wrote.
Hank’s ‘criminal’ offense
The economist drew the ire of the Bitcoin maximalist as Keiser calls himself after he told Yahoo finance in an interview that BTC has a price, but nobody knows its value.
“From a high theory perspective, you end up with a BTC that does have a price, that is objective, and we know what it is, but we don’t know its fundamental value, and my guess is it’s probably zero,” Hank said while explaining the difficulty in deriving a value for the world’s preeminent cryptocurrency.
The professor of economics questioned how the value of bitcoin can be derived when deciding its rate of exchange with national currencies, such as the dollar (GBP/USD) and the pound, adding that “there is no exchange rate model that would actually rationalize the bitcoin/US dollar exchange rate.”
Why fiat is superior to Bitcoin
While speaking, Hank explained where fiat gets its value from, justifying why it is superior to BTC.
The value of the world’s fiat currencies, such as the dollar and pound, comes from the backing of nation-states and the level of trust the majority of people place in them. The word fiat is Latin for “let it be done” and comes from the opening lines of the book of Genesis in the Bible. The words “fiat lux” or “let there be light” being God’s prime directive. Thus, fiat money has been issued by an authoritative decree that has absolute sanction, and trust in the value of a fiat currency is intertwined with the trust in the authority of the state that issues it, he said.
He explains, however, that Bitcoin has no intrinsic value, it is stored as computer code and has no physical properties.
