In a major development in the world of cryptocurrency, Zerodha founder and CEO Nithin Kamath has slammed several celebrities and businessmen who have allegedly been encouraging investors to bet on cryptocurrencies without giving any warning on the risks that comes with it, calling it ‘disgusting.’
The Zerodha CEO tweeted:
Watching famous personalities with huge fan followings trying to trigger their fans or retail investors to invest in super risky asset classes without talking about the risks, or caring about the risk profile of those who follow them is quite disgusting. 1/2
— Nithin Kamath (@Nithin0dha) January 6, 2022
In a following tweet, he added, “Thanks to Crypto, it’s been a case of “never meet your heroes,” with so many people I admired for peddling crypto, NFTs, etc. as safe and guaranteed. Nothing against Crypto, it would have been the same if stocks or even AAA-rated debt was peddled as being safe and guaranteed.”
Centre’s stand on Crypto
In November 2021, Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman had made it clear that it has no proposal to recognise Bitcoin as an official currency. Raising a specific question in this regard, Independent MP Sumalatha Ambareesh and Congress MP DK Suresh had earlier mentioned that Bitcoin transactions are silently booming in India in the last few years. However, Sitharaman clarified that the Union government does not collect data on Bitcoin transactions.
Nouriel Roubini: ‘Cryptocurrencies a misnomer’
Meanwhile, in November last year, While speaking at Republic Economic Summit, Nouriel Roubini, CEO of Roubini Macro Associates & Professor of Economics at the New York University’s Stern School of Business backed the Indian government’s stance on private cryptocurrencies, stating that calling Bitcoin or cryptocurrencies as ‘currency’ will be a ‘misnomer’.
Nouriel Roubini had said, “Calling these Bitcoins or rather cryptocurrencies as ‘currency’ is a misnomer. Anybody who knows anything about monetary theory, knows that for something to be a currency first of all there must be a unit of account but not in its price in bitcoins. Two, it has to be a scalable means of payment. It has to be a stable source of argue relative to goods or services. It’s so hardly volatile that it’s not a stable source of argue.” Roubini added that it has to be in numbers so that you can compare around the price of different goods and said, “But if you need Pepsi, Cola, Coca Token you cannot even compare their price of goods and services.”
“Suppose you have a mortgage that was a unit of accounting bitcoin and then the price of bitcoin goes up say by 50%, then you go bankrupt because the real bargain rupee or dollar of your bitcoin, the mortgage, goes through the roof. So, it has to be a stable store of argue relative also to the price of financial assets. So in my view calling them cryptocurrency is a misnomer. They don’t have any feature of a currency,” he further said.
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