Tyler Cowen is an economist and writer who co-founded the popular blog, MarginalRevolution. A professor at George Mason University, Cowen was named one of the Economist's top 36 economists who were most influential over the past decade. He's a popular thinker and blogger in a world of academics, and his work has appeared in Bloomberg and the New York Times. All this is to say that he's a smart guy.

And he's pro-cryptocurrency.

In an effort to understand what economists think of this burgeoning industry, I reached out to Cowen to talk about the history of crypto as it deals with monetary policy and ask a simple question: What would the greatest economists of the past have thought of the current crypto mania?

TC: What are economists thinking of crypto? Do they study it? Worry about it?

Cowen: I think most of them haven't followed it much. A significant subset are puzzled. They've not been the leading thinkers behind the crypto movement. Some in particular such as Paul Krugman have been quite harsh. There's a fair number of working papers people trying to model it, people who are intrigued and curious. So I don't think there's a consensus yet. But unless you work on monetary theory, the professional incentive to ponder crypto is pretty small and most people don't do it often. But the fact that they're economists doesn't make them as qualified to have an opinion as you might think.

TC: Do you see a new crop of Economist coming out or just focus on cryptocurrency?

Cowen: You need really a lot of external training outside of economics that none of us had in grad school, including just basics in cryptography wage. Some amount of time and experience helps as well. So, most of the best work on crypto is on medium, on Twitter. It's in weird places, and it's not by professional economists. Not even monetary theorists. I find this disheartening about my own profession, but that's how it is.