'Dr Doom' Nouriel Roubini says bitcoin may be a partial store of value

Bitcoin naysayer Nouriel Roubini, also known as 'Dr Doom', recently admitted that the digital currency may be a partial store of value a little more than two years after calling it and other cryptocurrencies "the mother of all scams and bubbles".

Famed for predicting the United States housing bubble of 2007-08, Roubini has been one of the premier critics of bitcoins over the years but his stance seems to have softened recently.

In an interview with Yahoo Finance, on being asked about his thoughts on bitcoin's recent bull run, Roubini reiterated that it is not a currency. "It may be a partial store of value because, unlike thousands of other what I call shitcoins, it cannot be so easily debased because there is at least an algorithm that decides how much the supply of bitcoin raises over time."

However, the 62-year old economist did not take lightly to other digital currencies saying, "most of those other ones literally are done ad hoc, and they’re being debased faster than what the Fed is doing."

Roubini, who teaches at New York University's Stern School of Business and is chairman of Roubini Macro Associates LLC, further explained that for something to be called a "currency" it needs to be a unit of account, a single numeraire, a scalable means of payment, and a stable store of value that is not very volatile.

Bitcoin is NOT a currency: it is not a unit of account, it is not a single numeraire, it is not a scalable means of payments, it is not backed by any asset, it is not legal tender, its price is highly manipulated & thus its partial store of value function is based on nothing.

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— Nouriel Roubini (@Nouriel) November 9, 2020

He claimed that bitcoin is not a unit of account since "nothing is priced in bitcoin or any other cryptocurrency."

On a year-to-date basis, Bitcoin prices are up over 113 percent.