Digital usurpers find it tough going at the Milken conference.
The barbarians, it seems, are still pretty hostile when it comes to Bitcoin and its brethren, with some good reason.
At the Milken Institute Global Conference in Beverly Hills, California, this week, the outlook on pretty much everything — from the stock market to the future of humankind — was rosy. One reporter noted that if Michael Milken, the former banker who once provided the debt for the biggest takeovers of the late 1980s, had painted rainbows on the walls of the Hilton, where the conference has long been held, they would have fit right in.
But the universally bullish outlook for pretty much every asset class didn’t extend to cryptocurrencies. New York University economist Nouriel Roubini, speaking at the conference, repeatedly questioned the digital currencies, and their promise, in colorful language. Charles Noyer, a cryptocurrency investor and believer who also spoke at the conference, said that he tactically plays down his personal enthusiasm for digital currencies there because he knows the crowd is skeptical. Alex Mashinsky, CEO of Celsius Network, which lets customers lend and borrow cryptocurrencies and raised money from 1,500 in an initial coin offering earlier this month, said that while some conference participants had expressed interest, finding investors there was difficult. “In the cryptospace, investors are throwing money at everything, here you have to prove a lot more to line up investors,” he said.
Some Air Out of the Bubble
Bitcoin prices have dropped from late last year, but are still up from a year ago
There were some signs of a big money thaw on crypto, however. Two panels during the three-day conference were devoted to digital currencies and blockchain. And on a panel on regulation, the chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, J. Christopher Giancarlo, said he thought regulators should be more open to allowing the trading of cryptocurrencies. But a panel titled “The Future of Finance” did not include a representative from the digital currency industry. Representatives from the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Treasury Department, who also spoke at the conference, suggested more regulation was needed.
