Dr. Doom, esteemed NYU professor of economics and all-round crypto hater, is grumbling again about blockchain. Heâs grumbled before. Though the origins and motives of his beef are unclear, itâs been brewing for a while. Heâs warned Bloomberg that âall this talk of cryptocurrency is bullshit.â He routinely rails on Twitter against the âmotley crew of crypto con men, scammers, criminals, trolls, shills, carnival barkers, self-serving idiots, price manipulators, conflicted insidersâ who dare insult him.  Today, he penned a â30 page detailed critique of cryptoâ and took to the U.S. Congress to decry blockchain as the âmost over-hyped technology ever...nothing better than a glorified spreadsheet or database.â So, heâs not a fan.
Grumbling, of course, is Dr. Doomâs thing. He first acquired relevanceâand his moniker (his real name is Nouriel Roubini)âin 2008, when he predicted that yearâs financial crash. But itâs been ten years since that lucky guess; now heâs looking for more dooms to say. On Tuesday he took to his soapbox with an even bolder proclamation. Crypto, he said, is centralized. More so, apparently, âthan North Korea.â
But this time, Doomâs words attracted the ire of Vitalik Buterin, the father of Ethereum. Before long, the two industry titans were at each otherâs throats, Queensberry Rules. Now, we know what youâre thinking: an esteemed Professor of Economics (that 30-page screed he wrote was for the US Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Community Affairs) going mano-a-mano against a wildly successful, brilliant entrepreneur on...Twitter? Yes, that's what happened. A similar spat happened among bitcoin cash developers last month.  This time, however, one of the interlocutors is a garlanded, 59-year-old academic. It tells a stern tale about the level of discourse in the industry right nowâitâs in the gutter.
In The Ring
October 8, 2018. 4:26pm. It started off fairly civil. Fairly. Doom began with a bombastic honey trap, calling all cryptocurrencies centralized, and criticizing the uneven distribution of crypto wealth. (Via a link to an interview with, er, Cryptonomist, presumably not Doomâs favorite rag.) Â
Yet Buterin remained calm, and gentle. First, he conceded that miners were a problem. But he called the latter point unfair, saying crypto was too niche to be fairly judged that way. Cello owners hold all the cellos, he said, but that doesnât make the distribution of cellos despicably unequal. He then said some maths.
As we wrote in Tuesdayâs Debrief, it was the âclassic Buterin scorched-earth line of attack, really: politely beg to differ, concede half the interlocutorâs points, then fry their self-confidence with a barrage of semi-incomprehensible technical details.â Dr. Doom didnât respond.
The tone then lowered.
âI officially predict a financial crisis some time between now and 2021,â Buterin posted on October 10, 2018, at 12:36pm. âNot because I have any special knowledge or even actually think that,â he continued, âbut so that I can have a ~25% (or whatever) chance of later being publicly acclaimed as âa guru who predicted the last financial crisisâ.â
He was, of course, mocking Dr. Doom. That guess Doom made in 2008 is his most prized asset, the reason we know he exists, the reason his wife loves him. The slight prompted a bitter response.
âVitalik, just shut up & speak about stuff that you can claim u know a lilâ about,â said the esteemed economist. He then derided him for his continuing failure to square the principles of âdecentralization,â âscalability,â and âsecurityâ with one another. Buterin attempted a counterattack, but it involved the phrase ârandom sampling requires non-ephemeral identities,â so fell flat.
Swiftly, decorum was flung from the window and flattened by a passing bus. Doomâs next trick? Libel. âVitalik Buterin,â he pronounced, âwas the ring-leaderâtogether with Joe Lubinâof the criminal pre-mining sale/scam that created Ether.â The libel intensifies: âThey stole 75% of the Ether supply and became instant âbillionairesâ of fake wealth.â Buterinâs response amounted to ânone of that is true.â But it was too late. Civility was dead.
We all lose
Thatâs if it hadnât already been buried long before. Though President Trump and his routine denigrations rarely make much of an impact on the crypto space, the discourse around the technology has nevertheless acquired his tone. But this time itâs doctors, academics, and engineers flinging the mud at each other. Itâs peer-review turned into peer-brawl. The Bitcoin Cash debaters, for instance, managed to transform a niche technical disagreement into a bitter, pointless territorial war that led to one advocate âDr. Craig Wrightâscreaming âLIES AND BULLSHITâ at a cluster of his bemused adversaries.
It could be that, with the future of finance potentially on the line, that the stakes are high enough to warrant this. Weâd have never beaten the Gerries if instead of waging war weâd just submitted elegant rebuttals to Hitlerâs genocidal policies on Medium, now, would we? But neither would the allies have banded together had Churchill repeatedly branded Roosevelt a âturdâ over a strategic disagreement. Pick your battles, crypto bros.