Speaking today on Bloomberg, Nobel economics prize winner Robert Shiller who has stated that the cryptocurrency “revolution is a sham” has now tempered his remarks about Bitcoin.
Responding to host Tom Keene, who characterized Bitcoin as “hugely generational” and referred to himself and his 72-year-old guest as “fossils,” Shiller explained that the response to Bitcoin is not a rational response to new information. “It’s a social movement. It’s an epidemic of enthusiasm – very much. It is a speculative bubble. That doesn’t mean that it will go to zero. Speculative bubbles recur. We had a bubble in Bitcoin in 2013. It looked like it was done. It fell from $1,000 to $200. But now, look, it comes back.”
Shiller has had a front-row seat to the exuberance of Millennials for Bitcoin. A professor of economics at Yale, he has seen on-campus enthusiasm for cryptocurrencies first-hand. “The kids at Yale say Bitcoin rocks,” said Keene.
“It’s generational and geographic also. The East Coast is less into it than the West Coast,” said Shiller.
East Coast interest in Bitcoin and crypto has been booming.
Philadephia-based Susquehanna, one of the world’s biggest investment firms, recently announced that it is building up its cryptocurrency services for high-end clientele, while Goldman Sachs-backed exchange Circle reports massive surge in crypto interest from institutional investors.
Meanwhile, the New York State Department of Financial Services just issued its sixth and seventh BitLicenses to Xapo and Square, respectively, to accommodate New York residents who want to buy Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies.
Bitcoin and the growing legion of blockchain projects and crytocurrencies, however, are a global movement.
According to research from Morgan Stanley, the UK has the highest number of legally registered exchanges, although it only accounts for 1% of cryptocurrency trading volumes. According to research by Coinhill, the currency most traded for Bitcoin within the past 24 hours is the Japanese yen (73.17%) followed by the US dollar (18.81%) and the euro (3.31%).
Although Shiller characterized Bitcoin “as a remarkable social phenomenon” with “some impressive cryptographic theory that’s coming out of computer scientists,” he maintains that Bitcoin is a bubble and that a significant reason for all the attention and enthusiasm is the prospect of getting rich.