Money Reimagined

The story of Haiti, the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, is a tragic reminder of the lasting impact of colonial injustice and how it extends into modern finance. This episode is sponsored by hellointerpop.io and The Sun Exchange. It’s why this episode, on the potential for blockchain technology and digital currencies to empower people in such places, begins with a powerful monologue by Sheila about the shameful, century-long legacy of a slavery-era debt. That debt, imposed by France in punishment of Haiti’s citizens for freeing themselves from their slave masters in a rebellion that founded their independence in 1805, later became a U.S.-owned asset serviced by a bank that would become Citibank. In that sense, this long-standing problem is directly related to the issue of Wall Street’s power and dominance in the age of dollar hegemony, a power that is challenged, in theory, by cryptocurrency and blockchain technology. We learn from guest Jerry Tardieu, a Haitian author, entrepreneur, and politician who represents Petion-ville in the Chamber of Deputies, of how that debt legacy and the dependence on aid that came with it, has challenged Haiti’s capacity to strike its own economic path. He calls for technologies and policies that boost access to investment capital rather than aid. We also hear from Daniele Jean-Pierre, the co-founder and COO of Zimbali networks, which delivers smart ledger solutions for the decentralized economy, on the kinds of solutions that entrepreneurs like her are developing to meet that call to action. - InterPop is redefining the future of NFTs and fandom. Learn more at interpop.io. - The Sun Exchange is offering CoinDesk Reports listeners a free solar cell with your first purchase and automatically lease them to power businesses in sunny, emerging markets. - Image credit: Heather Suggitt/Unsplash modified by CoinDesk See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

With CoinDesk’s Consensus just a week away, we decided that this week’s Money Reimagined episode should focus on the big macro and geopolitical themes that will be its hallmark. This episode is sponsored by hellointerpop.io and The Sun Exchange. Highlights of that landmark event include Federal Reserve Governor Lael Brainard’s perspective on the future of money, Bridgewater Associates founder Ray Dalio’s thesis on the end of the dollar’s dominance and a discussion/debate on the inflation outlook featuring former Treasury Secretary Lawrence H. Summers, Bloomberg’s Joe Weisenthal and CoinDesk’s Noelle Acheson. Attendees will be asked to contemplate where the global economy is headed in an age of monetary transformation and what that means for the power structures of the world as we know it. As a prelude, we invited Bruno Macaes, a Portuguese politician, author and influential thinker on geopolitical trends, and Tomicah Tillemann, the Director of the Digital Impact and Governance Initiative at the New America think tank, to give us their take on these matters. Some of the scenarios we discussed are challenging. They paint a picture of mass disruption of the global economic order. But both our guests had a somewhat contrarian take to a common view, held by many observers of geopolitical trends, that forces of technological change and economic stress will conspire to bring to an end to the era of U.S. financial, economic and political hegemony. In different ways, Macaes and Tillemann both argued that the U.S., if it plays its cards right, could turn this current moment of economic uncertainty to its advantage and sustain leadership of the global economy. To do so, they said, it must embrace the principles of open systems and open society that lie at the heart of the crypto ethos – and which, in theory at least, are ingrained in what are widely considered “American values.” - InterPop is redefining the future of NFTs and fandom. Learn more at interpop.io. - The Sun Exchange is offering CoinDesk Reports listeners a free solar cell with your first purchase and automatically lease them to power businesses in sunny, emerging markets. Image credit: Eric Prouzet/Unsplash modified by CoinDesk See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

If you were to describe what crypto represents in its entirety, either to the insiders who are obsessed with it or to the “normies” looking on with wonder from the outside, you might focus on technical issues related to immutability, censorship resistance, smart contracts, decentralized exchanges and so forth. Or you might use the language of finance and “asset classes” to talk about bitcoin as “digital gold” or ether as a commodity token that runs a decentralized network. This episode is sponsored by hellointerpop.io and The Sun Exchange. But to capture the full picture, you’d also need to deal with all the strange, sometimes obscure, sometimes crude, occasionally funny memes that constantly course through Twitter and work their way into the crypto lexicon. That’s important, not only because memes are integral to the crypto experience on their own, but because they are also driving some of the shifting ideas around money and finance generally. This, after all, is the era of SPACs, “stonks” and meme shares that rise because Reddit groups like WallStreetBets manage to bring the power and collective will of the mob to markets. In many respects, that traditional world of finance is only catching up with crypto. Dogecoin, the ultimate meme token, might be hitting headlines now with its latest spectacular price rally as it is following on the heels of the WallStreetBets GameStop phenomenon. But dogecoin really precedes it, having been around since December 2013. You could argue that dogecoin is the original stonk. This episode makes the case that if you’re going to try to understand how money is being reimagined in the new era, you need to go beyond the technology and the market dynamics and address the confusing cacophony of memes that drive the narratives around crypto. To do that we were joined by two people who’ve inserted themselves into this grand, collective storytelling exercise with more influence than almost anyone. We talk to Nathaniel Whittemore, host of CoinDesk’s “Breakdown” podcast, and Coin Center’s Neeraj Agrawal, to discuss the importance of all this to both the outside world and the strange but fascinating subculture that has formed around the crypto community. - InterPop is redefining the future of NFTs and fandom. Learn more at interpop.io. - The Sun Exchange is offering CoinDesk Reports listeners a free solar cell with your first purchase and automatically lease them to power businesses in sunny, emerging markets. Image credit:peterschreibermedia/iStock/Getty Images Plus, modified by CoinDesk See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

In what has become a de facto world tour of crypto hot spots, this week “Money Reimagined” is headed to Nigeria. This episode is sponsored by hellointerpop.io and The Sun Exchange. We talked to two Nigerian entrepreneurs – Yele Bademosi, the CEO of payments app Bundle Africa, and Adia Sowho, a venture builder and operator – about the burgeoning crypto innovation ecosystem in their country. Among this entertaining pair’s many insights was the idea the Nigerian Central Bank’s February order that banks shut down crypto companies’ access ended up being a positive for the industry. It spurred even more innovation in the space, inspiring local developers to dream up interesting new decentralized solutions for getting around the banking sector’s gatekeepers. The idea dovetails with some we’ve heard from other guests – from Democracy Earth’s Santiago Siri, for example, who spoke of how the startup scene in his native Argentina is shaped and driven by the failure of the existing financial system and the efforts by authorities there to constrain people’s financial freedom. It shows how the crypto world has fostered a new breed of developer-entrepreneur, one who no longer wants to work to change the existing system but is inspired to build entire new alternatives to it. We also learned from Bademosi and Sowho that the narratives the crypto community in the industrialized world tend to embrace about the technology’s value in the developing world are often misplaced. It’s convenient for people in the U.S. to talk up the idea that Nigerian activists were using bitcoin during the anti-government protests last year or that it is being used widely as a remittance and payments vehicle. But our guests point out those use cases aren’t as widespread as believed and that, much like in the U.S, most Nigerians are for now buying bitcoin as a store of value. On the other hand, they tell us Nigeria specifically – and Africa generally – is a hotbed of innovation in DeFi. And why not? The opportunities for experimentation and creativity for decentralized finance are arguably much greater in places where the existing financial system is underdeveloped. - InterPop is redefining the future of NFTs and fandom. Learn more at interpop.io. - The Sun Exchange is offering CoinDesk Reports listeners a free solar cell with your first purchase and automatically lease them to power businesses in sunny, emerging markets. Image credit: Fela Sanu/iStock/Getty Images Plus See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

With all the gyrations in crypto markets, it is easy to lose sight of why this technology has drawn so many passionate believers. In this week’s episode we go straight to that point by diving into the theme of human rights and the role that bitcoin can play as a medium for saving and spending that is free from the confiscatory powers of government – including those of authoritarian regimes. This episode is sponsored by hellointerpop.io and The Sun Exchange. Throughout its life, communities of activists all around the world have taken to bitcoin as a tool of empowerment. Sometimes it’s because they live in places where the local currency is constantly being debased by profligate governments. Sometimes it’s because they are at risk of having property seized by the regime. Sometimes it’s because they need a way to fund dissidents’ activities. To explore all this, we speak to the Human Rights Foundation’s outspoken chief strategy officer, Alex Gladstein, on how he, a career human rights campaigner, found his way into the weird world of bitcoin. We also have the pleasure of talking to an activist in Sudan, a person who goes by Mo and the podcaster pseudonym of @SudanHODL. - InterPop is redefining the future of NFTs and fandom. Learn more at interpop.io. - The Sun Exchange is offering CoinDesk Reports listeners a free solar cell with your first purchase and automatically lease them to power businesses in sunny, emerging markets. - Image credit: Phototreat/iStock/Getty Images Plus modified by CoinDesk See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This week’s Money Reimagined episode was recorded at the ideal moment to take stock of the biggest development in the crypto space this year: Coinbase’s public listing on the Nasdaq exchange. The show was recorded on Wednesday, the day of the listing, just after 4 pm, the time at which U.S. stock markets closed. So, with the help of Wall Street Journal reporter Paul Vigna (who was Michael’s co-author for both The Age of Currency and The Truth Machine) and of CoinDesk Director of Research Noelle Acheson, we broke down the day’s action, the history of what brought us to this point from when Coinbase was first launched in 2012, and what this means for the future: for Coinbase, for the crypto community, for Wall Street, and for Main Street, In tying itself to the corporate “suits,” is this disruptive firm from the crypto universe going to shake up the Wall Street establishment from within, or will those older institutions constrain it? What does the sudden scramble up the crypto learning curve look like for all those institutional investors who now feel they need to own – and therefore understand -- this stock and the weird new decentralized financial industry it services? Who’s the next Coinbase? And what does the inevitable influx of investment in search of that “new new thing” do to the funding of new projects and new ideas among startups that may end up supplanting Coinbase and eventually rendering it obsolete? We address these and many more in this episode. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Without letters of credit, bills of lading, shipping documents and trillions of dollars in global goods trade would grind to a halt. (And you thought our dependency on the Suez Canal was a problem!) This episode is sponsored by Interpop.io But the world’s system of trade finance, a highly complex setup involving banks, insurers, shipping companies, data providers and all manner of intermediaries, is far from ideal. There is massive fraud – check the New York Times’ account of the recent Greensill Capital collapse for – and severe inequity in terms of who gets favorable borrowing terms and who doesn’t. Without access to the trusted data needed to prove their creditworthiness, millions of small-and-medium enterprises are unable to obtain credit to cover the risks associated with exporting their goods. So they either run the risk of non-payment or simply cannot participate in the global economy. As a measure of that inequity, Sheila noted in her monologue to this week’s Money Reimagined episode – in which we talk to two blockchain pioneers trying to fix the trade finance industries many problems – that there’s currently a $1.5 trillion global trade financing gap. But then in his first comments, Tallyx CEO Aditya Menon offered an alternative analysis of how much of the goods trade goes unfinanced and came up with a $5 trillion number. That’s about half of the global trade in goods. Can blockchains and tokenization address these inequities? As you’ll hear from Menon, as well as from Skuchain co-founder Rebecca Liao, the answers lie in figuring out how to incentivize all participants – the exporters, importers, shippers and financiers – to share data in a way that unlocks funding faster. Skuchain is focused on making the information richer and more reliable along the supply chain. Tallyx is figuring out how to turn the contractual information such as invoices into tokens of value that can be traded in ways that allow smaller suppliers to monetize their legitimate receivables. The problems they are trying to solve aren’t easy. But that’s what makes their work so compelling. Blockchain projects like Skuchain and Tallyx offer a healthy reminder that beyond the razzamatazz of crypto markets and celebrity non-fungible tokens, meaningful impact is also possible if you work hard at the core problems faced by real-world entities. -- InterPop is building the architecture of an entirely new landscape of fandom using technology built on the Tezos blockchain to drive their vision. Visit hellointerpop.io to learn more. -- Image Credit: Mahmoud Khaled/Getty Images News See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Few countries have as deep and long-lasting a history of financial crises as Argentina. Given how otherwise blessed it is with natural and human resources, Argentina is Exhibit A in the argument that repeated monetary mismanagement will do lasting harm to long-term prosperity. A century of such crises, which has bred profound mistrust of the institutions of government among Argentines, took their country from being the seventh-richest nation on earth to the 75th. Now, with the advent of cryptocurrencies and blockchains, some finally a way out of this trap of mistrust. It’s no coincidence that Argentina has a relatively high level of bitcoin adoption nor that it has contributed a disproportionately high number of successful developers to the global crypto community. But is crypto the answer, or should Argentines continue to work within the system to get the accountable government they deserve? We explore that question, along with a deep dive into just what it is that explains Argentina’s uniquely dysfunctional economic experience, in his week’s edition of “Money Reimagined.” We’re joined by Lucas Llach, a professor of economics at Torcuato di Tella University in Buenos Aires, and Santiago Siri, the founder of Democracy Earth, a radical, blockchain-based solution for democracy inspired his struggles to reform government in his native Argentina. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

An insider's look at how Bitcoin is making renewable energy sustainable featuring industry veterans Meltem Demirors and Harry Sudock. As big banks, publicly traded corporations and some of the biggest names in finance become increasingly bullish on Bitcoin’s prospects, only a few objections really remain. These days on Wall Street it’s all about responsible investing as seen through the lens of “Environmental, Social and Governance,” (better known as ESG). On this episode of CoinDesk’s “Money Reimagined,” we speak with two of the top minds building out bitcoin mining in the U.S. for an insiders look at the real story on energy, money and sustainability. In this episode we’ll speak with Meltem Demirors, chief strategy officer of CoinShares, and Harry Sudock, vice president of Strategy at GRIID. To set the stage, earlier this week on CoinDesk TV, fund manager and “Shark Tank” co-host Kevin O’Leary said Wall Street has to satisfy sustainability reporting requirements before it can buy wholesale into bitcoin. He estimated that only 10% of institutions that wanted to buy had bought in, partly because of climate concerns. He continued, “All of these new providence concerns, which were not on anybody’s mind when crypto was simply the purvey of the hedge fund or the retail investor. Now it has to have a new standard. Where did it come from? How was it mined? Was it mined sustainably? How do I know I’m not supporting mining in a country where human rights are abused like China? All of these issues are at the fore for institutional clients.” These are valid questions, but they’re certainly not new, much less unanswered. Demirors described the problem as “two facts and two fallacies,” saying: “Fact #1 - Bitcoin mining is highly energy intensive. That is a fact. Bitcoin is the only network that I know of that documents its energy use and is extremely transparent about it, which I think makes Bitcoin a very easy target. It’s impossible for you to calculate how much energy the banking industry uses, how much energy the U.S. military uses. Most industries and sectors are very opaque about their energy usage. Bitcoin is not. Fact #2 - A majority of bitcoin miners are located in China. That is still a fact, we are working on changing that but it is a fact. From those two facts, some logical fallacies follow: Fallacy #1 - The logic then goes: Bitcoin miners in China are using dirty, coal-based power. That’s actually false and we have proven that to be false through our bitcoin mining research report. We were the first firm in the industry to do this research. We spoke to all of the miners first-hand and did a bottoms-up calculation where we found that 77% of all bitcoin mining done in China was done with renewable energy that would otherwise not be utilized. So that’s fallacy number one. Fallacy #2 is that bitcoin mining has an extreme carbon footprint. And that is something that’s also provably false, and I think an area that people who care about the bitcoin network are working to provide more data to make that extremely transparent. And then, the last logical, sort of “transitive property sum” that comes out of those four statements… Two facts, two idealogical fallacies is that “Bitcoin is bad,” which is a moral judgment.” Sudock, meanwhile, discussed his experience as a profit-oriented bitcoin miner who was sucked into environmentally responsible mining out of sheer necessity. “We didn’t enter this industry with an eye towards becoming a renewable operator. We didn’t think that that was sort of our ‘edge,’ but what we quickly found through conversations with everybody from very very large, federal energy producers in the U.S. to very small hydro dams that are run by Mom and Pops who can’t afford upgrades to their turbines, is that everybody is looking for revenue enhancement strategies that will support the growth and resilience of the energy that they’re producing. And the need for those enhancement strategies are particularly acute when you start to look at renewable generation. Those conversations at this point for us are inbound. I spend less time reaching out to energy producers than energy producers spend reaching out to me. And that’s a huge change.” All of this and more in this week’s episode of CoinDesk’s “Money Reimagined.” Image credit: Master Wen/Unsplash See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

At the end of a high-energy week in the burgeoning digital art world, “Money Reimagined” brings you the third and (for now) final edition of our NFT series. In between recording this episode and publishing it two days later, a non-fungible token attached to a piece of digital art sold for a whopping $69.3 million. The sale, orchestrated by Christie’s, turned the digital creator known as Beeple into the third-highest paid living artist. It also represented a high point in the media attention now swirling around this new, crypto-based technology. So, it’s appropriate we end on a note that grounds things in the reality of the technology and its potential to transform the creator economy generally, rather than being caught up in the celebrity story and media sensations. To do so, we talk with Roham Gharegozlou, the CEO and founder of Dapper Labs, the startup that in many respects is responsible for kicking off the entire NFT phenomenon. We talk about the early days when Dapper created the ERC-721 standard on Ethereum and launched the popular CryptoKitties program. We talk about why the team made the decision to build its own blockchain, known as Flow, and to migrate the business there away from Ethereum. And we talk about where this rapidly evolving industry, with its competing platforms and wild debates over rights and opportunities, is going. Join us for the conversation. Image credit: Benjamin Suter on Unsplash, modified by CoinDesk See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

In this week’s “Money Reimagined” podcast episode, we take the discussion around central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) down from the high-level geopolitical themes we’ve addressed previously and into what the technology can do for people at the grassroots level. To do so, Sheila Warren and I talked to Serey Chea, director general at National Bank of Cambodia, and Makoto Takemiya, co-CEO of Tokyo-based blockchain technology provider Soramitsu, about Cambodia’s new “Bakong” central bank digital currency and payments system. They provide a thought-provoking look at how small economies can use CBDCs to leapfrog their otherwise underdeveloped financial systems into something far more advanced. With the financial world obsessing about China’s launch of its new digital yuan and the competitive threat that poses to the U.S, which is now accelerating its work on a digital dollar, this is a reminder that there is real potential to do good with this technology in the realm of financial inclusion. However, there are real challenges – the impact on the banking system, privacy and security, to name a few. We address all of those and explore where this is going in this far-reaching conversation. Image credit: Paul Szewczyk via Unsplash modified by CoinDesk See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This week on Money Reimagined, we bring you part two in our series on non-fungible tokens, or NFTs, the crypto-based digital scarcity solution that’s taking the art and entertainment worlds by storm. After last week tackling the stage-setting theme of how access to information determines value in the art world and who gets to set it, this week we go to the thin of the wedge and look at real-world use cases where NFTs are poised to blow up that centuries-old power dynamic. To do that we talk to two trailblazers in the exploding field of Black digital art: South African artist Lethabo Huma and NFT collector Cuy Sheffield, who also happens to be the head of crypto at Visa. Can this technology break open the 'Old Boys Club' of the art world? Can contemporary artists use the new contractual terms behind NFTs and the power of social media to more directly reach buyers and build a reputation? And how might it enable creative collaboration, not only between artists but also between artists and a new breed of algorithmic bots behind a brand new genre known as “generative art?” We discuss this and more in this week’s episode. At a time when everyone from the NBA to Mark Cuban to Gary Vaynerchuck is diving into NFT mania, you can’t afford to miss this one. Image Credit: Mariya Tarakhnenko/Unsplash modified by CoinDesk See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

With much of the world focused on bitcoin and ether as prices breach new all-time high after all-time high, the “Money Reimagined” crew embarks on a more nuanced journey, one that eschews world-changing networks for an art-changing renaissance that's been long in the making. We're talking, of course, about the nonfungible token (NFT) movement that has engulfed the world of crypto collectibles. With big brands like Christie’s auction house and the National Basketball Association getting involved and some tokens already selling for six-figure sums, the question isn't if NFTs will force a very old industry to adopt some very new practices, it's when. On today's episode of CoinDesk's “Money Reimagined,” Michael Casey and Sheila Warren are joined by Nanne Dekking, CEO of Artory and formerly the top salesman at Sotheby's. Founded in 2016, Artory is creating the first standardized data collection solution by the art world, for the art world. In his former position at Sotheby’s New York, Dekking was vice chairman and the worldwide head of Private Sales. His close relationships with collectors and museums were integral to the continued growth of private sales at Sotheby’s. Prior to joining Sotheby’s, Nanne was vice president of Wildenstein & Co. He advised individuals, museums and foundations on the formation and development of their collections. From 1996-2001 Nanne was the founder and principal of Nanne Dekking Fine Arts, an art consultancy firm and gallery in New York. "Which scholar do I trust? Who in the art market do I trust?" Dekking said. "They don’t want to trust anyone." In this wide-ranging introduction to NFTs, collectibles and the traditional art market, the discussion ranges from Sheila Warren's Cryptokitty genealogy to the challenges of selling paintings by the old masters in litigious modern markets, plus a whole lot more. “There are so many charitable things you can do with all this technology but ultimately you want the market to understand the commercial benefits of it. Then it goes fast. The moment you’re in the realm of charity, it’s like ‘this is such a nice idea’ but in a way you’re dead in the water already if the market just thinks this is only nice for a charitable reason," said Nanne Dekking, CEO of Artory and formerly the top salesman at Sotheby's. "As long as the market believes opaqueness will help [its] business model, which it doesn’t any more, it’s a very old-fashioned idea… The moment Art-Net came up, the moment Google existed … it’s all about this crazy idea that you as a human being are so important in the sales process to an artwork. I mean, you’re not." Image Credit: Anna Hunko/Unsplash modified by CoinDesk See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This week’s Money Reimagined dives into the increasingly urgently needed Ethereum 2.0 upgrade. What is it and why does it matter? We talk with Danny Ryan, a researcher at the Ethereum Foundation. He has become a key player in the complicated “herding the cats” task of “herding the cats” of getting thousands of different stakeholders in this vibrant decentralized community aligned enough to undertake the massive 2.0 transition with sufficient cohesion. With Danny’s help we break the whole thing down in a way that’s accessible to people beyond the developer community: Proof-of-stake consensus, sharding, Layer 2, and how decision-making and development happens in this free-wheeling open-source environment. We put it all in the context of a giant boom for the Ethereum ecosystem, as money pours into red-hot decentralized finance (DeFi), as a mania for non-fungible tokens (NFTs) plays out, and as ether hits new all-time highs as large institutions gain exposure via new CME futures. All this is bringing into stark relief the urgent need to advance the system’s scalability as congestion on the network is driving up transactions costs, or “gas fees” to unsustainable levels. It’s a timely episode, in other words. Have a listen. Image Credit: Sander Weeteling/Unsplash See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

There’s a reason the Gamestop/WallStreetBets drama of the past two weeks got so much attention. It’s because it speaks forcefully to the inequities and systemic problems in both our financial markets and the internet economy and how they’ve shaped our politics and social tensions. So, in true Money Reimagined form, we wanted to have a super high-level discussion about what all this means for the future of money and society. And for that we called on someone who is a master at drawing big-picture narratives around such issues: Demetri Kofinas, the host of the popular Hidden Forces podcast. Demetri Kofinas is an insatiably curious media entrepreneur and financial expert. His mission is to make the connections that help you see the bigger picture, empowering you to make smarter investing decisions. He also hosts the Hidden Forces podcast, where he gives his listeners an edge by using his critical thinking approach to challenge the consensus narratives structuring our world . You can follow him on Twitter at @kofinas, check out his podcast at hiddenforces.io, and sign-up for more in depth content and analysis at Patreon.com/hiddenforces. Find Michael Casey on Twitter or Clubhouse (@mikejcasey) Find Sheila Warren on Twitter or Clubhouse (@sheilaw) Image Credit:Luke Stackpoole/Unsplash modified by CoinDesk See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

For this episode, we travel, metaphorically, to a town in the Swiss Alps that’s for the first time in 50 years experiencing some peace and quiet in January. This week was the World Economic Forum’s “Davos Agenda,” a conference filled with the usual roster of high-powered speakers but conducted entirely virtually, over Zoom, instead of in Davos. So, as Sheila took time out from helping run that agenda, we invited her colleague Adrian Monck, a long-time WEF managing director, to reflect on the forum’s past and future and how something as anti-establishment as cryptocurrency and blockchain is being integrated into its work. It might come as a shock to the rebellious strain that’s prominent in the crypto community, but its world and that of the WEF have some important similarities. Both must grapple with the core problem of governance in a decentralized environment, with the difficulty of solving problems that serve the interests of the whole when there’s no single party in charge. Both of them grapple with the problem of consensus. As Adrian explains, the WEF tries to resolve this by using its unparalleled convening power. It brings together disparate decision-makers from governments, businesses and civil society so they can find common ground on how to address the world’s many urgent needs. At times, that convening exercise has involved inviting radical newcomers, such as the internet tech community, into the tent. In this wide-ranging discussion, which partly delves into Sheila’s groundbreaking work introducing blockchain ideas to the WEF, we dive into the current challenge for this evolving process: how to bring the crypto disruptors inside. Image credit: Jack Ward/Unsplash modified by CoinDesk See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

As the Biden Administration gets underway, what can we expect for cryptocurrency technologies alongside an ascendent bitcoin? One day into the new President’s tenure we’ve brought in Kristin Smith, executive director of the Blockchain Association and Amy Davine Kim, Chief Policy Officer at the Chamber of Digital Commerce. In this episode we'll take a look into the regulatory future as we explore the relationships, lobbying and policymaking efforts within Washington. Album Photo by Tabrez Syed on Unsplash, modified by CoinDesk See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

On this episode of Money Reimagined the discussion comes home for an insiders look at how new, disruptive technology and government interact. For this discussion, hosts Michael Casey and Sheila Warren of the World Economic Forum are joined by Marvin Ammori, best known for his work on network neutrality and Internet freedom issues. Rounding out the panel is Christopher Giancarlo, former CFTC chairman and founding principal of the Digital Dollar Foundation. --- "My background is really 20 years of working on the internet. And I remember in the early days of the internet." said Marvin Ammori, "you know, one kind of piece of deja vu is what jumped out to everyone. The internet began with all the bad stuff. Congress couldn't believe there was porn on the internet. We had to protect the children from the number one thing that people noticed on the internet. And in fact, the first major case about the internet, had the Supreme Court upheld Congress's action, pretty much every website would have needed to get your credit card number and verify you're 18 to go on. The internet would have been for adults only." Marvin continued, "The entire trajectory of the internet would have been different, but luckily the Supreme Court pushed back on congressional action under the First Amendment. But the first impulse of congress 20 years ago with the internet was 'let's cripple this thing.' [...] We've seen all the tremendous benefits. [T]hings we could have never imagined back then. Now when it comes to cryptocurrency we see something similar." --- "The first wave of the Internet was an internet of information. And interestingly, it emerged into a federal regulatory structure that was really a pretty light zone because of our First Amendment protections of freedom of speech," said former CFTC chair Christopher Giancarlo. "So the internet, actually, in the first case, it didn't face a lot of opposition, I think, Marvin is absolutely right. There was certainly calls in Congress for banning because of pornography, but at the end of the day, the Democrat White House of President Clinton, the Republican Congress under Newt Gingrich came up with the 'first do no harm approach.' And the internet flourished and a lot of lessons learned were 'don't ask permission, seek forgiveness', 'keep going until you break something.' And the first internet wave, the wave of information flourished pretty successfully. We're now in a new construct, where in fact what we're talking about, as an internet of 'things of value', whoa... Well, it's a very different construct. We have at least three federal bank regulators regulating holdings of people's things of value, market regulators in Washington. And then in every state level. And so this new wave of the internet is not running into a regulatory light zone. It's actually running into a regulatory heavy 'no go zone.' And we've seen the clash. I mean, just look at the ICO challenge a few years ago. That was a statement by one regulator that they were not conceding ground in this new internet of value. [... It's] a product of our past and our approaches and our constitutional liberties, but also these new technologies, new waves, the internet bring new challenges to old constructs that we haven't often been successful in working through." --- On Dec. 18, the U.S. Treasury published a proposal to expand the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network’s requirements for identity monitoring and reporting by crypto exchanges. Under these proposed new rules, that powerful agency, known as FinCEN, would require exchanges to collect names and home addresses from the owners of private, self-custodied digital wallets that receive more than $3,000 in cryptocurrencies daily and to file special currency transaction reports about any wallet that receives more than $10,000 a day. The announcement prompted an outpouring of criticism from the crypto community and among digital rights activists. Many saw it as an attack on privacy. As of this recording, more than 7,500 comments have been posted to FinCEN’s site. That constitutes more than two thirds of all public comments received by the agency for various rules and proposals dating back to 2008. Then, on Monday last week, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, which sets and coordinates federal banking rules, offered a rule change that was much more favorably received among the crypto community. The OCC said banks could now use stablecoins to conduct payments and other activities, including stablecoin tokens issued on public blockchains such as Ethereum. It prompted some breathless commentary on how integrating the old world of banking with the new world of decentralized finance paves the way to a new global financial system of programmable money. To many this seemed like a weird good cop/bad cop routine out of Washington. Is the Administration pro- or anti-crypto? But to Michael Casey, there’s much more coordination here than meets the eye. There’s a common theme wi

Join Michael Casey and Sheila Warren as they speak with Matthew Davie the Chief Strategy Officer of Kiva and Alpen Sheth Senior Technologist of Blockchain at Mercy Corps. It's Finally 2021, the year we all were promised. Even though the calendar has turned, the world is still on a wild ride. So today we go back to the fundamentals. They call it the charitable-industrial complex: a system where money for development, for humanitarian needs, and for improving the lives of billions is controlled through a top-down process, run by U.S. charities and shaped by U.S. tax rules and regulations. The first Money Reimagined podcast episode of 2021 dives into the problems this creates. Can we get away from this top-down, centralized system to build a bottom-up model that empowers the people charities are trying to help? And will the decentralizing power of crypto and blockchain technology play a meaningful role? In this episode we dig into the "why" of this empowering new technology. What's the point? And more importantly, who is it for? “Reimagining money isn’t about money at all but more about the complexity of the systems surrounding it. [...]The exciting part about Crypto is that it has the potential to be a partial fix for the problems of exclusion plaguing our financial system” said Sheila Warren. According to Matthew Davie, “There is a gap between the informal sector and the formal sector, and you can’t build a bridge without figuring out how to solve that problem. So, we came at this from the system side saying we need verifiable identity and how do we do that?” “What we find is that the unbanked are just too broad of a category to comprehend so it has to be broken down. There [are] substantial gender inequalit[ies]. Whether its device ownership, around participation in the economy, around disasters... People are just stuck underneath layers and layers of intermediaries to just do basic activities” said Alpen Sheth About our guests: Matthew Davie @KIVA focuses on long term strategic initiatives to help drive systemic financial inclusion for the world’s most venerable populations. He oversees corporate strategy, emerging technology development, and policy and regulatory engagements. Alpen Sheth, PhD, is Senior Technologist, Blockchain, at Mercy Corps. a blockchain advisor for companies in the insurance, identity, and energy sectors. Previously, he co-founded the Economic Space Agency, a blockchain R&D startup, and later became the Head of Product at etherisc.com, an insurtech company, creating smart-contract based applications in several different countries See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Join Michael Casey and Sheila Warren as they speak with tech ethnographer Tricia Wang and metaMe CEO Dele Atanda, as they dig into social media privacy and the value of personal data. For the first time since the “Internet 2.0” era began at the turn of the millennium, the dominant social media, search and e-commerce platforms are facing existential challenges. The disruption could come from legal efforts as anti-monopoly lawsuits evolve in both the U.S. and Europe. Or it could come via some nascent alternatives to the platforms’ centralized model, including from blockchain-inspired startups. Wang, who joined us on this week’s episode of the “Money Reimagined” podcast, says these responses won’t lead to a meaningful alternative until we gain a better appreciation of the role data plays in our internet interactions. Data, she says, “is not just information. Data is relationships.” The algorithms of Google, Facebook, Amazon and others place the greatest value not in static, simple information points like your name, address and income, but data that reveals your relationships with other people. That matters, Wang says, because the story of those connections is equally important to humans because it is our connections to others that describe who we are. The imbalance is not just that ad dollars flow to Facebook and Google rather than to the users who generate the content and build the audiences the platforms and their advertisers monetize. It’s that, as detailed in Shoshana Zuboff’s “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism”, we are trapped in an ever-tightening feedback loop in which these companies use our data to modify our behavior. There’s a scary Matrix-like aspect to all this. It’s why the other guest on this week’s podcast, metaMe CEO Dele Atanda, views his company’s work building a more decentralized, blockchain-powered data marketplace as an exercise in protecting people’s human rights. Creating that marketplace and figuring out a meaningful expression of the value of people’s data is how we will ultimately restore agency over our digital lives, he says. “We need to create a unit of account that we can measure – not just on the basis of size [as bytes] but on the basis of sensitivity, identifiability. These issues are central to how this information can be used to help or harm us,” he said. Also important, Atanda says, is the governance structure of the database storing the information, which speaks to the role to be played by blockchain. The more “permissionless” and decentralized the architecture behind the data marketplace, the more confident individuals can be that the rights to their data are protected. All of this seems pertinent in a week in which society was once again found vulnerable to data failures at centralized systems. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Raoul Pal, CEO of RealVision and influential global macro investor, found himself in the middle of this fight recently after he tweeted to bitcoiners that KYC is in their interest because it will bring institutional money into the asset and boost its value. As someone with an account bearing the name SexyWebCamPro100x noted in one of more than 700 replies to that remark, the tweet begged for a meme of someone kicking a hornet’s nest. Pal is an influential thinker about Bitcoin’s place in the future financial system. So we invited him onto this week’s Money Reimagined podcast to discuss his brawl with Crypto Twitter. For balance, we also invited CoinDesk columnist Jill Carlson, who, among other roles, is a founder of the Open Money Initiative, which focuses on boosting financial access and economic freedom for underserved communities. Pal offered a nuanced explanation of his position. He said while his point was partly about allowing both bitcoin HODLers and institutions to “get rich,” it was also that for the Bitcoin system to be a transformative force it needs the “network effect” of more money coming into the space, which in turn requires institution-friendly regulation. “For people to realize their ambitions that it’s a stateless money … for it to be adopted by people who live within the confines of a sovereign state, unfortunately it will have to be regulated and there’s almost nothing we can do about it,” Pal said. Some might see a contradiction: for Bitcoin to realize its power as a “stateless” network, the state must exercise more control over it. But Pal’s point is about sequencing. He says we need to first go through a process of official accommodation within the existing system to advance Bitcoin’s journey along “Metcalfe’s Law.” Once it becomes a ubiquitous network, then it is in a position to properly challenge that system. Indeed, as Carlson pointed out, the positive thing, for those who believe in Bitcoin’s disruptive potential, is that “you’re not going to implement KYC and AML at the protocol level.” Since “there is nothing inherent to Bitcoin that can be regulated, enforced or controlled in that way,“ it can at that level always resist official coercion. But she also worried that the ever-growing encroachment of compliance requirements on applications built on top of that protocol impedes access to it among marginalized and financially excluded people. Carlson cited how LocalBitcoins, a peer-to-peer exchange network that was once a “gateway to economic freedom” in places that impose capital controls and other forms of monetary repression, has “increasingly come under scrutiny and has to institute more and more KYC and AML standards and protocols. She added, “That’s problematic where we are talking about people who don’t have any identity or are unbanked and are refugees and so forth.” See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Join Michael Casey & Sheila Warren as they speak with Elizabeth Rossiello, CEO of AZA Finance and Sebastian Serrano, CEO of Ripio for a discussion on the past, present and future of bitcoin and stablecoins in Africa and South America. Bitcoin, Stablecoins and International Adoption This week’s accompanying Money Reimagined podcast episode looks at the adoption of cryptocurrencies and stablecoins in emerging markets, which over the past year has seen real signs of life. Is this finally the moment to realize one of the great hopes of this technology: to enable financial empowerment in developing countries where traditional finance is constrained? To explore that question, my co-host Sheila Warren and I are joined by Elizabeth Rossiello, the founder and CEO of AZA, which has for seven years been developing digital payment solutions in African markets, and Sebastian Serrano, the founder and CEO of Ripio, which has been doing similar work in Latin America for more or less the same amount of time. Photo by Captureson Photography on Unsplash modified by CoinDesk See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

In the lore of digital disruption, Eastman Kodak Co.'s downfall is particularly momentous. Kodak was once one of the world's most powerful companies. But it failed to act on digital cameras and online photo sharing, despite seeing the trends years before. (Kodak engineer Steve Sasson created the first digital camera in 1975.) It's an apt story to remember now as the digital money revolution rolls ahead at a time of momentous political transition. On this episode of CoinDesk's Money Reimagined, join Jen Zhu Scott, Executive Chairman of The Commons Project, Tanvi Ratna, CEO of Policy 4.0, along with hosts Michael J. Casey and Sheila Warren of the World Economic Forum for this deep-dive into the potential of, and thought behind China's forthcoming DCEP, better known as the digital yuan. With DCEP, China’s supply chains will become hyper-efficient, giving it a big advantage over other countries’ production sectors. And as those models extend into China’s international One Belt One Road initiative, foreign dependency on its production processes could grow, giving Beijing geopolitical clout. Out of this, China will forge financial autonomy. Its digital currency will eventually be interoperable with other tokens and blockchains, allowing its businesses and their foreign trading partners to move money across borders without using dollars as an intermediary. They’ll bypass New York, in other words. Solution: Open Money This won’t happen overnight. But the effect on confidence in the U.S. could arise within the next four years. How should Washington react? Christopher Giancarlo, former CFTC chairman and the founder of the Digital Dollar Foundation, is pushing for a digital dollar that would integrate constitutionally enshrined privacy protections, making it more appealing than the digital yuan, which many fear will become a Beijing surveillance tool. But will people truly trust the U.S. not to monitor digital dollar transactions? After all, as Jennifer Zhu Scott, chair of the Commons Project, noted in this week’s Money Reimagined podcast, global finance is already subject to a comprehensive U.S.-led system of surveillance. So, while we’re right to worry about a Chinese “panopticon” ingesting people’s identifying information, that’s not the data threat the U.S. can or should compete with. In the same podcast episode, Policy 4.0 CEO Tanvi Ratna said the bigger issue is how troves of DCEP-generated anonymized data will enable Chinese businesses to extract huge efficiencies and unlock innovation across decentralized economic systems. There may be a way for the U.S. to compete here. But it will require a radical, disruptive solution. This is an episode you won't want to miss. Original Album Art Image by Kido Dong / Unsplash modified by CoinDesk See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

In this episode of our Money Reimagined podcast, Sheila Warren and Michael Casey speak with two outside-the-box thinkers on their ideas for improving governance. Quadratic Voting and Open Auctions One of our guests was Glen Weyl, the political economist and Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research New England, who co-authored the book “Radical Markets” with University of Chicago Law School professor Eric Posner. We chose to focus on just two of the many ideas that that book puts forward. One is quadratic voting, which allows people not only to vote for or against a particular issue but to express how strongly they hold that view by buying extra votes – up to a certain limit of assigned credits. The cost in credits of each additional vote increases by a quadratic formula. It’s designed to help small groups of voters who care deeply about particular issues while still constraining them from overly skewing results. Weyl has also worked on a variation of the concept with Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin called quadratic funding, which in theory could diminish the influence of wealthy “whales” in voting systems that are based on financial holdings or contributions. The second big idea we explored is that of perpetual open auctions. Here, every bit of property, including what we might otherwise think of as public property, is owned by private entities with the proviso that it is always up for auction and that the majority of the value created from it is shared equally among citizens as a social dividend. Weyl and Posner argue that such an arrangement would incentivize owners to manage the property well, and that the wider distribution of wealth creation would give a greater number of people the wherewithal to start businesses. It would also be easier to develop land for infrastructure, such as high-speed rail lines, because the developer could easily acquire it. Both of these ideas are rooted more in legal and process innovation than in software and distributed computing per se. But they intersect nicely with concepts associated with the crypto and blockchain space. One is the potential for self-sovereign identity models to prevent people from gaming quadratic voting. Another is the potential enhancements that smart contracts, non-fungible token-based property, and decentralized finance (DeFi) concepts such as automated market-making might bring to open auctions. Also, quadratic funding might fix free-rider problems in blockchain projects, Buterin believes. Smart taxation Our other guest was Jeff Saviano, the global lead of tax innovation at EY. He is a member of the Prosperity Collaborative, within which organizations such as the World Bank, MIT Media Lab’s Connection Sciences lab and the New America Foundation are working with governments to improve transparency and efficiency in the collection and distribution of taxes. Saviano talks of how blockchain-based tracing systems might not only give taxpayers a transparent view of how their taxes are being spent but also incorporate programmability. For example, the actual, uniquely identified dollars that you contribute could be channeled directly and transparently into identifiable services that immediately benefit you and your community. Or, governments could use smart contracts to put hard constraints on those dollars, so only certain categories of expenditure, and not others, are enabled. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

In this episode, Michael J. Casey and Sheila Warren of the World Economic Forum are joined by the newly reelected Premier of Bermuda, David Burt, who is spearheading projects to use the island as a testing ground for stablecoins and to launch a communally owned national digital bank. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This system is broken. It has become a leviathan – too big, too comprehensive. Giant fines have skewed the risk-versus-payoffs for banks, which impose compliance on everyone regardless of size. (This is despite AML guidelines typically allowing ID exemptions for transfers of up to $1000, and in the U.S. up to $3,000.) It’s time to scale down, not up. “There is a principle in design that in order to optimize the system, to maintain the most positive outcome, we have to sub-optimize the sub-systems,” crypto compliance expert Juan Llanos said during this week’s episode of the Money Reimagined podcast. “That means we may have to learn to live with a little money laundering. We might have to live with the risk that someone in Somalia might be a criminal trying to get through the cracks.” A more open mind from regulators toward cryptographic technologies that help regulators manage system-wide risks without imposing strict identity requirements on everyone would also be welcome. Research by the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab into how to identify system risks within otherwise anonymous bitcoin transaction flows offers one potential way forward. The test is whether policymakers can respond to the human cost of the existing approach. “Is this the system that really promotes prosperity in our world?” C-Labs General Counsel Brynly Llyr asked during the same podcast episode. “I mean, yes, money laundering is very serious, tax evasion is very serious, but when we look at the remittance markets and the folks who are relying on … transfers of $50 and $100 ... is this really what we want our system to be cracking down on? Is this the best use of our resources?” See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This week, Michael Casey and Sheila Warren talk to Hyperledger Executive Director Brian Behlendorf about self-sovereign identity, the topic of this week's column. A developer whose three-decade career has seen him deeply involved in efforts to foster a more open internet, Brian grasps, like few others, the nuances of how human beings should live within a rapidly changing digital economy. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Money is changing, but where do we go from here? Through high profile interviews and thoughtful analysis, join CoinDesk's Michael Casey and Sheila Warren of the World Economic Forum as they explore the connections between finance, human culture and our increasingly digital lives. In this inaugural episode media studies professor Lana Swartz and multimedia artist Nicky Enright join the discussion. Sushi, Hotdogs, Yams, Shrimp. The whimsical, food-obsessed names of DeFi protocols are antithetical to the stodgy imagery of the mainstream financial system they seek to disrupt. Banks’ memes, by contrast, skew toward strength and durability. (Think of the rampart lions and Roman columns at the entrances of bank branches in old parts of London, New York or Paris.) DeFi’s critics say the silly names betray the fact it’s merely a fad and a game – or worse, a scam. It’s all imaginary, they say. It’s not real. The problem with that perspective is that all aspects of money, including the financial systems built on top of it, are imaginary. And, in case you’re wondering, that’s a feature, not a bug. Israeli historian Yuval Harari calls money “the most successful story ever told,” even more important to the evolution of society than religion, corporations and a host of other human-imagined institutions. Like those concepts, money’s power hinges on the collective adoption of a common belief system. It takes a set of mutually understood rules and gives them symbolic representation in a token we call a currency. In exchanging that token, we reach agreements that reflect those rules and so enable commerce, collaboration, value creation and, ultimately, civilization. Storytelling and cultural creation have always been integral to how society fosters this belief system, how we’ve forged communities around currencies. It’s why representations of money and the conversations around it are rich with iconography, foundational myths and stirring language. This process of collective imagination has become firmly tied to another powerful imaginary concept: the nation-state. This combination has been so effective that it has survived the introduction of new technologies and tokens over time. We’ve gone from shells to coins to banknotes to checks to credit cards to Venmo, and each time we’ve just accepted that a new transfer vehicle can convey the same rules and values we’ve always attached to our national currencies. This is a useful lens to apply to the many new ideas for money bubbling up in the crypto world. Whether it’s bitcoin’s bid to become a digital gold-like currency or the fight between Uniswap and SushiSwap to dominate liquidity in DeFi’s lending markets, the semiotic process for creating memes and stories is vital to the establishment of a new system. National elites used such methods to get us to collectively imagine a bank-centric system of fiat currencies. Those of us who want to change that need to do something similar. We need to reimagine money. Imagined Communities If you have a $100 bill in your wallet, take a good look at it. On one side, there’s Ben Franklin’s balding head and torso, behind which are a quill, an inkwell with the Liberty Bell superimposed onto it, and an extract from the Declaration of Independence. There are also the seals of the U.S. Treasury and the Federal Reserve, the signatures of the Secretary of the Treasury and the Treasurer, a serial number and other identifying numerals. On the other, we see Independence Hall in Philadelphia, where Franklin and other Founding Fathers signed the declaration, along with the words “In God We Trust.” On both sides, the number 100 appears numerous times in and around a highly ornate border. Combined with cotton threads and watermarks, the baroque design helps make the note difficult to counterfeit. But more importantly, the imagery appeals directly to patriotism. It’s all associated with the nation-state to which the dollar, we are encouraged to believe, is indelibly linked. Now think about the actual value of the note, by which I mean the physical piece of paper. You could use it as a bookmark, maybe, make a paper plane out of it, or write a very small amount of information in very small print on it. But none of those uses add up to $100 in utility. A banknote’s value comes almost entirely from our shared imagination, a commonality of beliefs fed by centuries of cultural production that forges a type of community. It’s only because the payer and the payee share those beliefs that this piece of paper can function as an instrument for clearing that community’s debts. Each tribe of cryptocurrency advocates is endeavoring to create the same sense of community and belief around its preferred token. How they attain that is a cultural challenge. What’s Real? In November 2014, I created a video for The Wall Street Journal with Nicky Enright, a multimedia artist. We filmed him walking the streets of the Diamond District in New York’s Midtown as he wore an A-frame sand