| From the Desk of Don Yocham: No one has a crystal ball, but you'd never know it from the way some academics speak.
Case in point: A very confident-sounding economist from Cornell University recently said that Bitcoin will soon wither away to nothing because of its limited use and lack of a price anchor, among other criticisms.
Other critics have said that Bitcoin is more a vehicle for speculation than for facilitating trade.
I think it's a lot of hot air from folks with a myopic view of the monetary system — and perhaps a vested interest in keeping the status quo. After all, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it".
For one, the criticism that Bitcoin has no price anchor is kind of funny, considering one could level that same criticism at the US Dollar. It has been an unanchored-fiat currency since Nixon took it off the gold standard in 1971.
But his more surprising criticism of "limited use" leads me to believe that this economist has no understanding of the emergent properties of money, much less any capacity for counterfactual thinking.
Because astute Prosperity Pub readers will know that if anything, Bitcoin and its related ecosystem are flourishing with new and interesting use cases to power massive amounts of economic activity.
From payment processors (goodbye Visa and Mastercard) to smart contracts (goodbye governments?), the landscape is awash in companies jockeying for position in the increasingly robust marketplace of Bitcoin-related services.
From my experience, academics can develop a tremendous amount of expertise in a particular domain. But the narrow limits of their Ivory Tower perspective do nothing to keep them from opening their mouths about topics that require broad, real-world knowledge.
Here's another gem…
The researchers went so far as to predict that Facebook would lose "80 percent of its peak user base between 2015 and 2017"
Now, at the time, Facebook had 874 million users worldwide with a stock price of about $54 per share.
Eight years later, not only has Facebook not disappeared — it's more than tripled its user base. And its stock price closed just above $300.
Remember that when you hear academics without any " skin in the game" loudly proclaim some prediction.
And if you're convinced that Bitcoin and blockchain-related technologies are the future — or if you're just looking to hear about the possible ways that technology might disrupt established industries — and how you could position yourself to profit from the coming disruption, join me over at the Prosperity Pub Telegram channel. | 
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