Expert on risk management, mathematician and author of several popular books on fighting uncertainty ("Black Swan," "Antifragile," "Skin in the Game" and others) Nassim Nicholas Taleb is a well-known anti-crypto speaker.
He has taken to Twitter to point out what he believes to be a major weakness of the cryptocurrency market.
Taleb names crypto market's weakest point
Taleb tweeted that currently, the overall worth of the crypto market is $1.5 trillion ($1.23 trillion, according to CoinGecko). However, if market participants sell from 1% to 4% of the crypto offered in it, this total market capitalization will drop by 50%, he claims in the tweet.
Mostly, this refers to Bitcoin, as the flagship cryptocurrency usually leads the way for the prices of other coins, making them correlated with it — they fall when BTC drops and they rise when Bitcoin goes up.
Bitcoin lover converted to BTC hater
Taleb is known for his stable and harsh criticism of cryptocurrencies, although he used be a fan of Bitcoin and praised it when a bank crisis and the "WhatsApp Revolution" hit Lebanon in 2019.
In 2021, however, he sold all his Bitcoin, explaining this step by BTC's harsh volatility waves. "You can't price goods in BTC," he tweeted back then.
Bitcoin pushed back by Fed's recent decision
Over the past two months, Bitcoin was recovering on the wave of the banking crisis that hit the U.S. as several large regional banks crashed — Silicon Valley Bank, Signature Bank and just recently First Republic Bank followed suit.
Bitcoin managed to touch the $30,000 level. However, three days ago, the Fed Reserve announced another rate hike, BTC slipped below the $29,000 level, where it stays for now, trading at $28,568, according to CoinMarketCap.