The first videos of the highly anticipated debate between Dr. Nouriel Roubini and Arthur Hayes have been released, showing the affectionately called Dr. Doom losing his cool when the topic of Bitcoin’s scalability was discussed.
The two went head to head at the Tangle in Taipei, a debate held at the Asia Blockchain Summit.
The hot debate about crypto gets even hotter
The debate between Dr. Nouriel Roubini, one of the most outspoken critics of the crypto industry, and Arthur Hayes, the CEO of BitMEX, the world’s second-largest crypto exchange by trading volume, has been the most anticipated crypto event of the year.
The showdown happened on July. 3, 2019 in Taipei, at the Asia Blockchain Summit conference. Since then, the entire industry has been speculating as to what went down behind closed doors, as only BitMEX and the conference organizers were allowed to film the debate.
Many believed BitMEX was hesitant to release the footage as it would paint the exchange in a bad light. Dr. Roubini didn’t spare any words on Twitter, either, accusing Hayes and BitMEX of hiding the video.
They are hiding the whole video as @CryptoHayes and @BitMEXdotcom got totally reckt for once since their daily biz model is to @BitmexRekt “degenerate gamblers” retail suckers with 100x leveraged toxic crypto derivatives. These folks are worse than blood-sucking leeches. https://t.co/UiJcn5Mfjf
— Nouriel Roubini (@Nouriel) July 8, 2019
But, after more than a week, BitMEX released two videos from the debate, showing just how heated the discussion really was. The 13-minute footage showed the two frequently interrupting and talking over each other, with the moderator Andrew Neil even resorting to shouting to calm the discussion down.
Crypto industry is a “cesspool of stinking shitcoins”
The video of the second round of the debate caused a stir in the crypto community, as few expected that Dr. Roubini would lose his cool. The video starts off with emotions running high, with Roubini clearly struggling to keep his composure when speaking about the “shady stuff” happening with Bitcoin.
Hayes, on the other hand, seemed much more at ease, keeping a smile on his face while taking jabs at Roubini’s comments. He talked at length about how Bitcoin represents the choice people need to have when it comes to their money, offering them the option not to have governments and large corporations control their money.
However, Roubini countered Hayes’ point by saying the future of finance is in fintech, and not in cryptocurrencies or blockchain. He criticized Bitcoin’s scalability, saying that there are already multiple payment systems used by billions of people that enable tens of thousands of transactions per second.
Roubini cited AliPay, WeChat Pay, UPI, M-Pesa, Venmo, and PayPal as examples of successful centralized systems. Those systems, he said, were “real things” with “real business models” that make money that do transactions for “real goods and services.”
Cryptocurrencies, on the other hand, aren’t used for “real transactions,” and the entire industry was just a business of “trading one shitcoin against the other one. Roubini also called out BitMEX, saying it was nothing more than a “middleman making money off of shitcoins worth nothing.”
But, however surprising Dr. Roubini’s comments might be, they’re in line with most claims made by crypto skeptics. So far, neither he nor Hayes made any groundbreaking arguments to support their sides, leaving much of the public disappointed. We’ll all have to wait for the entire debate to be released until a true winner can be declared.
