I remember how many people were still cheerleading it up to a year ago. Folks would have been better off reading “Black Swan” by Nicholas Taleb and save some money.
The irony is that Taleb was a big promoter of bitcoin for many years, and even wrote the forward for the first edition of "The bitcoin standard" praising it for being anti-fragile and a black swan event that mainstream financial experts will fail to understand.
Around 2020 he fell out with some of the btc community due to their covid stance (he was and is very anti-anti-lockdowns and anti-anti-vaxers). Since then he gradually moved first to btc skeptic then to a major anti-btc figure.
To be fair, there was initially some very justified excitement around cryptos and BTC in particular. Once the drawbacks became obvious, it's totally fair to change one's mind.
Am not sure you can give him that much benefit of doubt. He was promoting btc heavily way after the initial excitement of crypto up until the end of 2019 (he gave a public lecture in Lebanon where he suggested it and blockchain technology are a good safe haven and solution for the country's currency crisis).
He was basically a fan and promoter from 2015 - 2020, that is a really long time for a critical thinker like him not to notice the flaws. I think he was blinded by his ever growing fanbase he had in the BTC community.
BTC didn't really go above $12k in 2019 so anyone who bough in then and held would be ahead still (at about $19k now in the current slump). Maybe the flaws weren't that bad.
BTC is open source, decentralized, and you can mine it. The existing coins were mined. People may use the tool for scams, but that doesn't mean that the tech itself is a scam.
By contrast, many alts were pre-mined or similar and initial coins were sold or given away via airdrops. Thus, the developers had greater control over the network.
