You'd have all seen Nouriel Roubini's performance in front of the US Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Community Affairs this week, and you must be sick and tired of hearing about it already.
 
Here's his full testimony if you missed it. As Albert Wenger recommends, do the effort of going through it all.

(h/t Messari)

You may have also missed some of his colourful tweets he spiced it up with. As a 'bubble expert', Nouriel has been consistently wearing the Dr Crypto Doom cape for pretty much as long as anyone can remember, his stance being the very extreme epitome of the innate conflict between economists and technologists. But seriously, just click on a couple of those tweets to get a sense for how hopelessly he seems to have lost the plot with his Twitter megaphone. Or maybe he's just trolling?

Despite our best efforts, we find it hard not to feel utterly embarrassed for such a display.

And not because we disagree with what he says. We do of course, most of it is self-evidently a hyperbolic, blindly one-sided rant. On that, here's an absolutely epic takedown of his speech by Ethan Buchman, and here's another very balanced one by Alan Silbert (both have since been blocked on Twitter by Nouriel). For a summary of both sides arguments and senators reactions, Jake Chervinsky also published an excellent thread, without being blocked.

So yeah, one can easily disagree with a lot of it, perhaps even agree with some bits. But that's not it. It's his destructive attitude and language we are finding most disturbing. How that helps him preserve his “personal, intellectual and academic reputation”, the only things he's got at stake according to the last lines of his testimony, is truly a mystery. For sure it makes the headlines and gets him high profile speaking arrangements at least, we get that. Over here we've not been shy about constructively critiquing the excesses of this industry ourselves, or surfacing thoughtful and well reasoned arguments from all camps. In fact we are desperately seeking for those, it helps everyone grow out of their own bubbles. Ironically though, Nouriel comes across not much different from the armies of shillers he (rightly) bashes, who hear no arguments, who bite your finger off or block you the moment you point at a potential fallacy in their arguments, who shout louder and don't listen back. At the end of the day, we have learned absolutely nothing new from his testimony, zip. Nada.

That's a bit of a shame, particularly for the members of the committee. There was no attempt to educate about the technology, something that is clearly badly needed in those circles, but only to superficially emphasize the very worst emanations of it and attack with cheap ad hominems. There was another side to the testimony, with Peter Van Valkenburgh of CoinCentre, but obviously he made less headlines being less sensationalist.

Perhaps Nouriel should have spent a day or two at the latest ETHGlobal events, or maybe pop by Devcon4 in Prague at the end of the month, it's sold out but we can magic up a hard fought ticket. I guarantee he will be shocked not to find the “motley crew of crypto con men, scammers, criminals, trolls, shills, carnival barkers, self-serving ignoramuses, price manipulators, conflicted insiders” that he claims this industry is filled with. He's more likely to bump into some world-class developers and cryptographers who are dedicating their careers to this regardless of what Coinmarketcap says. Perhaps he should spend a day at Fullnode in Berlin, then jump on the first flight to Buenos Aires and hang with the Voltaire House crew and hear what they are up to down there and why they are doing it. And while he is in South America, he may even hear firsthand accounts of Venezuelans who had their gold confiscated at the boarder as they tried to flee their hyper-inflating country.

After all, we'd expect no less from someone who once claimed the following:

“I’ve found that there is nothing better than visiting a different country, even if for three days. What you can hear from exchanging ideas with people gives you a much better sense of what’s happening as opposed to what’s written.”

You said it, “exchanging ideas”, being open to new ones, respectfully. That's how we all progress here.

Anyways, that was letting some steam off. The reality though, which Albert perfectly captures in his brief remark, is that it's really down to us all. His views (not his tone hopefully) are likely to represent the perspectives of the large majority of world's population that is yet to be on-boarded. And so, if there's any chance to grow real adoption and usage beyond the early adopters that we are, it will be by learning how to convincingly address the concerns of the Roubinis of the world. 
 
Peace.

PS: As we were putting the finishing touches to this week's edition, Chris Burniske also published a post, titled The Nouriel in All of Us, which does a splendid job at expanding on and generalizing some of our points:

"While insults and expletives can be rich and colorful in person, through a screen they lazily fall flat and convince no one.

Chris' post goes even one level higher, blaming a broader "breakdown in civility" in our cultures, particularly online ones, for situations like this one.

- Adam White (employee #5 at Coinbase) is joining Bakkt as its first COO.

- Blockstack is following Aragon's lead and is going the decentralized route for its governance and vehicles.

- IBM is chugging along trying to make enterprise blockchain a thing, now Carrefour is joining.

- ZRX launched on Coinbase Pro. Quite surreal to see something you invested in before it even existed going all this length.

- Some $28M in fiat funds of a Canadian exchange have been frozen and are being disputed

- Drama reminiscent of Tezos is emerging at Cardano, where the Foundation is being accused of not doing its job as promised. 

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