‘The Black Swan’ author calls Bitcoin a ‘tumor’ which is ‘hurting the economy’

Despite the cryptocurrency sector growing and Bitcoin (BTC) gaining more supporters with each day, not everyone seems to be a fan, including ‘The Black Swan’  author Nassim Nicholas Taleb.

Indeed, Taleb has slammed the modern economic environment by stating that it has led to the creation of tumors such as Bitcoin and claiming that such phenomena are hurting the economy, on CNBC’s Squawk Box on September 15.

“I think that we’ve had 15 years of Disneyland that basically has destroyed the economic structure. (…) The Fed overshot by lowering the interest rates too much. (…) You are hurting the economy, creating bubbles, creating tumors like Bitcoin.”

On top of that, he also blasted the “new generation” for not understanding the basic economic concepts, concluding that:

“There was at some point such a thing as a discount rate. All these notions escape the new generation.”

Known Bitcoin critic

It is worth noting that Taleb is a known critic of Bitcoin who, in February 2021 said he was getting rid of all his Bitcoin, citing the token’s volatility as its main disadvantage, despite its rally at the time which led the decentralized finance (DeFi) asset to reach the price of $49,000, followed by even higher rallies.

A couple of months later, he denounced the flagship digital currency, stating it had failed as a currency and that it worked like “an open Ponzi scheme: money made by someone is taken from someone else,” as Finbold reported.

More recently, in early August 2022, Taleb appeared to be mocking MicroStrategy’s CEO Michael Saylor for stepping down from his position after leading an ambitious plan to accumulate more Bitcoin for the company, calling his departure “another nail in the coffin” to the strategy.

Meanwhile, the maiden cryptocurrency at press time was trading at $20,078, down 1.14% on the day but up 3.89% across the previous seven days, according to the data retrieved from CoinMarketCap.

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