When Bitcoin started, almost nobody believed that it would become the asset with the highest nominal value of the cryptographic market. Much less than cryptocurrencies would be a disruptive element in the international financial system. At first, those who knew the name Bitcoin, did not give much credit to innovation. Among them, was the university professor Niall Ferguson.
Bitcoin: 2013-2014
When people started to take the cryptocurrency more seriously, it was between 2013 and 2014, when its value had not yet reached the 4 digits. However, the vast majority of scholars and experts in the financial system still did not give much credit to the asset.
Niall Ferguson retracts
Niall Ferguson, well-known historian and British professor, assured that the proposal of Bitcoin and any decentralized currency was nothing more than a fraud, a “complete deception”. For this moment, in 2014, the cryptocurrency was quoted at 450 dollars.
These statements were issued based on your knowledge of financial history, and in response to your child’s intentions to invest in digital assets.
Now, five years later, he retracted these statements. In an exclusive event framed by the Australia Financial Review Business Summit, he publicly declared his mistake by stating that:
“I was very wrong to think that there were no uses for a cryptocurrency based on Blockchain technology”.
What to hope for the future?
In turn, the professor, also author of the book “The rise of money: a financial history of the world”, commented that the next decade will be the great stage for the following major financial innovations. Even bet that they will be many more than those witnessed these years with the rise of financial technology, better known as Fintech.
And like Ferguson, there are also many other academics who have recanted opinions previously issued about the supposed “fraud” or “great failure” that were supposed to be cryptocurrencies.
Competition and detractors
However, there are still many detractors of digital currencies, who as yet are not convinced of the usefulness of this technology, have tried to discredit it whenever the opportunity presents itself. As for example Nouriel Roubini, who not only catalogs Bitcoin as a big scam, but considers Blockchain technology useless, comparing it with a more complicated Excel spreadsheet.
Also published on Medium.