Bitcoin fans are making fun of economist Paul Krugman after he vented on Twitter the other day about dealing with a particularly rough financial company.
Is Krugman Getting a Taste of His Own Medicine?
Krugman has long been anti-bitcoin and crypto. He’s offered words on his skepticism for some time, and it’s clear he’ll probably never take digital assets seriously. It’s obvious that there are many bitcoin fanatics out there that have taken his words somewhat personally over the years, and it’s coming out in the recent social media attacks on the famed economist.
In his initial discussion, Krugman said he was feeling disappointed about recent changes to Venmo that allegedly were preventing him from making payments. On Twitter, he wrote:
I’ve been using Venmo for years, but now it won’t allow me to make payments. I spent a long time in chat with representatives, and they told me that they can’t explain why or fix it. The software has taken control.
Many crypto fans took notice of his message and pounced on the chance to bring him down even further. Several responded with three simple words:
Bitcoin fixes this.
Others went further in their criticisms, claiming that bitcoin could potentially aid the world’s poorest populations, which at the time of writing, don’t have access to apps like Venmo. They pointed the irony of the situation out through tweets like this:
Imagine what it is like for billions in the world who are not even allowed access to payment networks like Venmo. Literally billions of the world’s poorest.
In a recent discussion, Krugman claimed that many people had turned their backs on bitcoin and crypto, and thus were flocking to gold instead given it had proven itself to be a much more stable asset in the past. He commented:
But investors are losing faith in fashionable technobabble. They still want their pet rocks, but crypto’s plunges and scandals are causing some of them to return to pet rocks with centuries of tradition behind them. That is, gold, the pet rock of ages… Bitcoin has lost more than two-thirds of its value since its peak in late 2021, and many much-hyped stocks such as (cough) Tesla have fallen from grace, but gold has hung in there, with its current price just a few percent off its 2020 peak.
He Thinks Gold Is Better…
He also took issue with the idea that bitcoin was somehow a hedge against inflation. He said that if 2022 proved anything, it’s that bitcoin was the opposite given the moment inflation set in, BTC began to decline faster than anyone could have imagined. He said:
You might be tempted to say that investors are buying gold because they fear inflation, but that hasn’t worked for bitcoin, which was also supposed to be an inflation hedge.
