“Very smart” is knowing that there are a lot of areas where one isn’t so smart or informed. So yeah, he’s not very smart. I’m sure he’s smart in a very narrow domain, but that doesn’t make him a unique genius.
Out of curiosity (it was too early for financial speculation or “free”-market fanboi-ing) I put up a Bitcoin miner on a client’s spare server back in 2010 and promptly forgot about it and the wallet it was associated with about 9 months later. When I realised I might have made millions the miner and server it was chugging away on were long gone, but it might have gone the other way.
It was a punt, and the fact that I was minting the chips at the casino early on doesn’t change that (or the fact that the chips were nothing more than what someone called “Math Beanie Babies”).
It can work, but the projects run by Libertarian rugged individualists like this guy are doomed to fail because Libertarians.
