Morgan Stanley’s Dennis Lynch shared a light-hearted analogy during a discussion at Morningstar’s yearly investment conference today, claiming that Bitcoin’s insatiable ability to defy the odds and rise from both technical and fundamental adversity portrays that of the South Park cartoon character Kenny.
The 24-series show has garnered a global audience base for its weird and wacky sense of humour, epitomised by the long-standing gag that Kenny dies in each episode, only to be rebirthed and gleefully unaware of his brutal demise in the following show.
Head of asset management firm Counterpoint — a Morgan Stanley subsidiary — and keen advocate of the show, Lynch, expressed his belief in the resilience of leading cryptocurrency asset Bitcoin since inception over a decade ago.
After experiencing and surviving numerous bearish cycles, Bitcoin has established itself as a widely recognised and respected modern payment method and store of value in the mainstream market.
Major corporations such as Microstrategy, Tesla, and Galaxy Digital Holdings have all publicly revealed billion dollar investments in the asset, the latter now reporting an immense $5.3 billion.
In his Kenny-inspired speech, Lynch stated:
“I like to say that bitcoin’s kind of like Kenny from South Park – he dies every episode, and is back again.”
Technical data from Cointelegraph Markets reveals that Bitcoin (BTC) has fallen 14.04% across the week in the wake of yet another Chinese crackdown on cryptos.
The People’s Bank of China, or PBoC, this week announced a fresh strategy to combat cryptocurrency adoption in the country. Legal and governmental departments will strive to improve coordination and communication practises to effectively suppress crypto-related activities.
However, according to Lynch, Bitcoin already possesses some of the same antifragile traits — witnessed in the monopoly of big-tech firms, burgeoning political establishment, capital-hungry Wall Street financial markets and the self-rejuvenating Greek mythological monster Hydra — to counter this.
“I think (bitcoin) demonstrates some ‘antifragile’ qualities during this period of time.”
The term antifragile was coined by esteemed author Nassim Nicholas Taleb in his 2012 book to express the definition for the opposite of fragility, in that something that gains from disorder.
In the book, Taleb wrote:
”Antifragility is beyond resilience or robustness. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better.”
A well-documented example of this was Bitcoin’s previous all-time high of $20,000, a seemingly insurmountable figure during the harsh bear market of 2018-19 — and especially following the pandemic’s financial crash to $4K — but a level that one year on was more than tripled with $65,000.