Bitcoin could be extinct by 2118: Yale’s Robert Shiller

Written by Shashwat Srivastava

Yale’s Nobel Prize-winning economist Robert Shiller has made an incredibly bold assumption. According to the Yale professor, Bitcoin could go extinct within the next 100 years. He is drawing parallels between the world’s leading cryptocurrency and the dinosaurs.

“Bitcoin won’t look anything like it is today. It will have a different name, if it exists,” Shiller said on CNBC’s Trading Nation. “There will have been many hard forks changing it and changing it. And, it’ll be a matter of dispute whether it exists or not.”

Even though according to his statement, the end of cryptocurrency is far away, it does not mean that BTC will not suffer in the current market.

“The one scenario is that something like what happened after 2013 when Bitcoin topped $1,000 and then lost 80%  of its value. It looked like Bitcoin was just fading away,” he added. “It’s so hard to predict these things.”

In four years however things have completely changed. Last December, it hit a record price just short of $20,000. Weeks later, Bitcoin suffered a major hit— sinking to $6,400. It’s now trading in the low $7,000s and is still up 233%  over the past 12 months.

“It looks like a bubble,” according to Shiller. There is one thing though that Shiller likes about crypto-mania, which he has repeatedly dismissed, is the excitement and innovative spirit it has ignited.

“It’s getting people enthusiastic, and people are making different kinds of cryptocurrencies,” he noted. “There are thousands of them now, so something good may come out of it.”

Shiller went on to say that he was amused when one of his economics students recently asked if he could keep his laptop on during his final exam so he could execute a cryptocurrency trade.

“That’s a new first for me. That shows real enthusiasm,” Shiller laughed. “I said, ‘okay, if it’s so important to you, you can trade during the final exam.”

Robert Shiller is one of three people who were jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2013 for their work on spotting financial bubbles. Shiller is an admitted Bitcoin bear who has ridiculed the cryptocurrency market ever since it started garnering countless headlines.

You can read the original article on btcwires.com here.