One reason I feel privileged to write about digital money is the ideas and technologies it seeks to disrupt aren’t just a few years or decades old. They date back centuries, even millennia. Like gold, for example. As bitcoin’s price has soared to new all-time highs and a parade of big-name investment professionals such as …
Money Reimagined: Bitcoin vs. Gold Is a Battle of Narratives Read More »
The good news is America is not in the midst of a full-blown civil war – not yet, at least. But, however you feel about Joe Biden’s apparent victory in the most difficult presidential election in living memory, you’d be foolish to believe all is well in this country. Four years after Donald Trump rode …
Money Reimagined: Crypto-Informed Ideas for the Future of Government Read More »
For this special Halloween edition, CoinDesk Executive Editor Marc Hochstein weighs in with a guest column about the spookier aspects of the banking system. It’s a perfect follow-up to last week’s newsletter on the harmful legacy of the U.S. Bank Secrecy Act. Before you dig into it, let me remind you to check out this …
The Money Reimagined Podcast After reading this newsletter, make sure you check out the latest edition of our podcast. This week, Sheila Warren and I talk to Hyperledger Executive Director Brian Behlendorf about self-sovereign identity, the topic of the column below. A developer whose three-decade career has seen him deeply involved in efforts to foster …
Money Reimagined: Fixing the Internet’s Big Flaw Read More »
For Democrats, it was a moment of truth. For Republicans, it was “fake news.” Among some members of the crypto commentariat, there was a very different reaction to The New York Times’ recent scoop on Donald Trump’s tax returns – a bombshell story to kick off a week of even bigger bombshells about the now …
Money Reimagined: Trump, Crypto and Fairer Taxes Read More »
For Australians of my generation, historian Geoffrey Blainey’s phrase the “tyranny of distance” was the defining descriptor of our place in the world, a place that seemed awfully far from everyone else. In September of 2020, with hundreds of millions of broadband-connected homes using global video-conferencing services like Zoom and with remote work the norm …
Most people would be happy to have World Wide Web creator Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s wealth, which is reportedly somewhere between $10 million and $60 million. Yet, Berners-Lee’s net worth pales into insignificance against that of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who last week became the first person ever to be worth more than $200 billion. There’s …
Last year, before a pandemic changed the world, surveys showed millennials and adult-age Generation Z respondents steadily developing a curiosity in cryptocurrencies if not buying into the bigger idea that the technology will transform money. A Michelmores survey in the U.K., for example, found that 20% of affluent millennials – the cohort born between 1980 …
Money Reimagined: From COVID Generation to Crypto Generation Read More »
The Cato Institute’s George Selgin recently quipped that economists who are neither gold bugs nor advocates of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) are distinguished on Twitter by their relatively low follower numbers (himself included). The joke, for which I owe a hat tip to Nathaniel Whittemore’s podcast interview with Selgin on The Breakdown, seems especially relevant …
Money Reimagined: How a Dangerous Idea Could Work Read More »
I attribute my early interest in bitcoin to my six years as a correspondent in Argentina. The lesson I took from that country’s repeated financial meltdowns is that any fiat monetary system requires a bedrock of trust in the nation’s governing institutions. When people don’t trust their government, the system is always prone to collapse. …
Money Reimagined: Warnings From an Argentine Tragedy Read More »
