On Thursday (1 December 2022), a Nobel Prize-Winning economist expressed how he really feels about blockchain technology in an opinion piece for the New York Times (NYT).

That economist is Paul Krugman, who is “Distinguished Professor of Economics at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, and a columnist for The New York Times.” According to Wikipedia, in 2008, Krugman was “the winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his contributions to New Trade Theory and New Economic Geography.”

In his NYT opinion piece, Krugman, who admitted to being a “crypto skeptic” in July 2018, wrote:

“We are, many people say, going through a ‘crypto winter.’ But that may understate the case. This is looking more and more like Fimbulwinter, the endless winter that, in Norse mythology, precedes the end of the world — in this case the crypto world, not just cryptocurrencies but the whole idea of organizing economic life around the famous “blockchain.”

“And the real question, it seems to me, is why so many people — not just naïve small investors, but also major financial and business players — bought into the belief that this bad idea was the wave of the future.“

He went on to say:

“Amid all the sound and fury over FTX, I’m not sure how many people have noticed that the few institutions that seriously tried to make use of blockchains seem to be giving up.”

Two of his examples were the Australian Securities Exchange (ASX) and integrated logistics company Maersk, which both recently announcing the shutting down of their blockchain projects.

Krugman concluded his piece by saying that although some people may attack him again for not “getting it”, it appears that “there never was an it to get.”

(By Siamak Masnavi)