Seems like Krugman phoned this in.
Half of the column is other people's words and at no point does he even attempt to back up the headline (which acts as his thesis) that Bitcoin is Evil.
He wrote a slightly more in-depth opinion in 2018 [0], but again, he ends up casting doubts on the adoption/use so far, but hand-waving away those who would talk about the future of the technology.
Krugman probably has to deal with more cryptocurrency enthusiasts than I do, but I'd be far more interested to hear him propose a theoretical fix for the problems he identifies, or some admission of the potential for blockchains. Without that, in both the OP's link and [0], he just comes off as contrarian.
Krugman's Nobel Prize was well-deserved, but like Chomsky and other popular academics, it's so hard to separate the brilliant-thinker signal from the spotlight-powered noise.
0: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/31/opinion/transaction-costs...
Half of the column is other people's words and at no point does he even attempt to back up the headline (which acts as his thesis) that Bitcoin is Evil.
He wrote a slightly more in-depth opinion in 2018 [0], but again, he ends up casting doubts on the adoption/use so far, but hand-waving away those who would talk about the future of the technology.
Krugman probably has to deal with more cryptocurrency enthusiasts than I do, but I'd be far more interested to hear him propose a theoretical fix for the problems he identifies, or some admission of the potential for blockchains. Without that, in both the OP's link and [0], he just comes off as contrarian.
Krugman's Nobel Prize was well-deserved, but like Chomsky and other popular academics, it's so hard to separate the brilliant-thinker signal from the spotlight-powered noise.
0: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/31/opinion/transaction-costs...