Paul Krugman's 10-Year History of Being Wrong About Bitcoin

Kyle Torpey | 6.10.2021 4:00 PM

Nobel Prize–winning economist Paul Krugman is one of the most influential individuals in his field, which means people listen when he talks about bitcoin. Unfortunately, most of what he has had to say about the cryptocurrency over the years has been misguided, uninformed, or just plain wrong.

It's sometimes difficult for the average person to understand what economists and politicians are talking about when they debate policy, but the value proposition of bitcoin can be easily understood by anyone through its NgU technology ( NgU is an abbreviation of Number Go Up and is a meme based around bitcoin's deflationary monetary policy). While Krugman has stated that his 1998 prediction that "the Internet's impact on the economy [would be] no greater than the fax machine's" was supposed to be a fun and provocative thought experiment, it may be much more difficult to explain away his many confused and oftentimes arrogant takes on bitcoin over the past ten years.

Krugman first wrote about bitcoin in The New York Times back in September 2011 . In this post, Krugman mainly compared bitcoin to gold in a rather negative light. "To the extent that the [bitcoin] experiment tells us anything about monetary regimes," he wrote, "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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