I think crypto performed well in the Monday pseudo-crash

Check out the replies here. On first reading, many are mad at Cowen for "glossing" over some of Bitcoin's fundamentals. How can he be right when Bitcoin correlates to other risk assets? So how is it in his mind more liquid?

You actually have to read a bunch of comments to get Cowen's point, which is as nuanced as you'd expect from an econ prof, but the article is probably intentional rage-bait; here are some that I found interesting:

If it is a risk asset that does not distribute dividends or generate and return earnings, and it is known by all to be the first asset class to go on sale when everyone prizes liquidity the most, won’t savvy traders absolutely brutalize BTC holders who do this until it is so painful as not to be viable?

And doesn’t that kind of volatility jeopardize the actual use cases of BTC?

The point here is that BTC is international, and governments are hands-off. American stocks or bonds taking? U can literally set the clock to when their government is going to "rescue" them with some shady intervention. For Bitcoin, people could literally "sell it to zero," and nobody would step in to intervene. There are no national interests to be protected. And Cowen says this is good because it means it is qualitatively more liquid than some Wall Street assets. Another commenter has a similar point:

fiat currency itself is a shoddy product. If the best defence of fiat currency is "if you trade fiat currency for something that isn't fiat currency, then you can keep up with and at times exceed the inflation of fiat" then the problems are pretty clear. And you'll still have all the issues around realising gains. You have to sell your shares into fiat to spend but those stockmarket exchanges are frozen all the time for all sorts of reasons. Robinhood stopped trading literally the other day when the Yen carry trade issues were spiking. Cryptocurrency is actually usable and better money natively. I don't have to go and chase shares or whatever to not have my purchasing power wrecked (depending on the crypto of course, some get more inflated than the worst fiat).

This is a really interesting argument, and funny to vocalize at the same time, but the fact that crypto market's liquidity is technically ruggable is good for crypto as an asset class for some investors, I'd imagine.