TechCrunch interviews me about crypto

TC is the interviewer, TechCrunch (John Biggs), not I, here is one bit:

TC: Folks liken this tech to cargo cults. You build the trappings of an economic system in hopes that one magically appears. Is this accurate?

Cowen: I think the crypto people are super, super smart on average. They’re smarter than economists on average. And they have skin in the game, right?

TC: Does the profit motive color the experience?

Cowen: Well, people in crypto want to build systems that work. It’s fair for all of us to have uncertainty about how that will go. But the price of crypto assets have been pretty high for a while now and they’ve taken big hits and come back. So I don’t think you can now say it’s just a bubble. So what exactly it would be is still up for grabs, but I think the bubble view is increasingly hard to maintain.

TC: Are we assuming this stuff is here to stay? That bitcoin won’t disappear in a decade?

Cowen: That is strongly my belief. Now, there’s a lot of other cryptoassets and I think most of those will disappear. There were many social media companies fifteen years ago also and many are not around but obviously social media is very much a thing.

TC: What’s your take on decentralized, from an economic perspective?

Cowen: I think we will end up with both centralized crypto and decentralized crypto, and they will serve quite different functions. So, obviously, there were advantages to centralized systems. You can change the more quickly, more readily. There’s someone to manage them, someone to oversee them. But you also pile up costs. So I think both will prove robust. But again, I would readily admit that still up for grabs.

There is much more at the link.