Economists *are* working on decentralization
There was an excellent interview Sunday morning in TheMarker (Hebrew) with professor Eli Ben-Sasson of the Technion (text, video). Ben-Sasson is a brilliant computer scientist, blockchain visionary and a person I like very much altogether; plus his new venture Starkware is super exciting.
The only thing I want to add is that I disagree with Ben-Sasson’s protest that economists are not researching blockchain and cryptocurrencies.
Many leading economists are.
The ex-commissioner of the Israeli central bank for instance, Jacob Frenkel, has been advising the Saga Foundation on creating a “low-volatility environment” for blockchain projects. MIT has two labs dedicated to the subject, one in the MIT Media Lab focused on cryptocurrencies and one in the Sloan Business School focused on crypto economics.
Sure, not all economists are doing that, and several prominent scholars even made disparaging remarks as to the current nature of cryptocurrencies.
Of course, not all mathematicians and computer scientists have been studying blockchain in recent years. It is OK that some economists don’t either.
The contemporary field of monetary policy research is relatively young, with most breakthrough research made in the last 50 years. Of course, all this research focuses on the common notion of central banking, which is, well, centralized.
I’ve been talking to several leading economists that are working on models for decentralized monetary policy, and I’m anxious to start seeing models for such in the next few years.
But serious science takes time, in economics just as it does in maths. It may take a decade or two to have good, proven models.
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