Follow Our Podcast
Recent Episodes
The blockchain threat to traditional finance
From investment banks to broker-dealers, asset managers, clearing houses, custodians and securities depositaries, almost every segment of traditional finance is now under threat from blockchain technology. That’s the key message from Townsend Lansing, our guest in the latest New Money Review podcast, ‘the future of money in 30 minutes’. Lansing, a lawyer and former investment banker, describes how new tokenised fundraisings are gaining ever more interest. In the podcast, Lansing also discusses: · How the fraud-ridden 2017/18 bubble in initial coin offerings (ICOs) has prompted intense interest in the future regulation of token offerings; · How security tokens offer companies to issue traditional equity and debt but to record that issuance in a new way—on a blockchain; · How utility tokens potentially represent a revolutionary new way for technology companies to sell their services and products; · Why millennials may prefer owning and trading tokens to holding a brokerage account; · Why there’s a tension between national or regional financial market regulation and the idea of a single global financial infrastructure; · How initial exchange offerings (IEOs) are an unregulated evolution of initial coin offerings (ICOs). · Why the recent Bitfinex fundraising is so significant.
Six billion Davids
Our guest on the latest New Money Review podcast is Andreas Antonopoulos, a computer scientist, author and public speaker. He made a flying visit to London last week and New Money Review editor Paul Amery had the chance to sit down with him for half an hour during the Cryptocompare conference. Andreas is not only one of the world’s leading experts on bitcoin and cryptocurrencies, he’s also a political thinker and philosopher. We started by asking Andreas about his thoughts on bitcoin and cryptocurrencies as a technology. That led us in to a thought-provoking discussion of the internet, privacy, governance, democracy, the environment and the future of the planet. You can listen to the full 30-minute interview here: below we publish some quotes from the discussion. A unique blend of earlier technology “Bitcoin is a combination of technologies that existed before: cryptographic primitives, peer-to-peer networking (which we’ve had since Napster), the mechanism of proof-of-work, various concepts in distributed systems, and hashes and Merkle trees.” “It was the first digital currency to be decentralised enough to survive.” A revolutionary idea “What’s unique about bitcoin is the synthesis of all these technologies into a cohesive idea. It allows us to establish consensus across great distances without giving centralised control to anyone. You have rules without rulers, the ability to achieve common truth every ten minutes.” “Bitcoin is just an extension of the internet itself. The internet has been abused by many different companies and governments in many different ways. But at the same time it’s also brought great opportunity and freedom to people. Cryptocurrencies are the next stage of this evolution.” “This new technology is not just about finance. It’s also about systems of governance and trust—things like voting and how you make community decisions at different scales. It’s going to have a profound impact.” “This is going to be a test—not for cryptocurrency, but for governments.” The fight over privacy “As soon as governments threaten these systems, they are going to become much stealthier and more anonymous. The bottom line is that financial privacy is a basic human right.” “I’m convinced this is an asymmetric fight: there are far more people that need these freedoms and are prepared to fight for them, non-violently, than there are people who actually have control over these systems and the ability to suppress them. It’s six billion Davids versus a few million Goliaths.” Getting used to new technology “It’s a continuous process of improvement. We’ve seen that happen with every new technology. At the beginning it’s hard to use and difficult to understand. Gradually the tech gets easier and society adapts to new words and new concepts. After a generation no one remembers the time when it wasn’t so.” Custodians are dead “We don’t need 19th century ideas of fully trusted, fully risky custodians in order to solve the problems of individual security. We can use the decentralised systems themselves to solve the problems they introduce.” Implications for political and legal systems “We can really create some fascinating systems of control, which are flexible, secure and which do not depend on any single central authority.” Bitcoin, energy usage and government war machines “For the time being, the only consensus mechanism that operates at huge scale is the proof-of-work algorithm that underlies bitcoin. The energy use is significant, but it provides a very significant benefit. Bitcoin is the most secure system this planet has ever built.” “Let’s not make snap judgements. The market gravitates towards good sources of energy. We should be taking the external cost of producing carbon and applying that to the cost of electricity, wherever it’s produced. We’re not doing that in many places.” “Giant war machines, paid for by massive amounts of debt and driven by inflation, are the greatest polluters on the planet. We have to look at the big picture.”
Paying for the new cold war
In our latest podcast, Shamir Karkal, chief executive of fintech firm Sila, talks about payments, fintech firms’ valuations, monopolies, Facebook’s new Globalcoin, the intensifying technology cold war and blockchains. Some highlights from the podcast: Europe as a fintech hub “The number of innovators, the amount of innovation and the infrastructure for innovation is happening so rapidly, much more rapidly than in the US, where the pace of change is now slower than in Europe.” Fintech valuations “Measured against the whole financial services industry, fintech still has a small market share. But the story of innovation is that, when change is happening at an exponential pace, for a very long time it seems like nothing is happening. And then in a few short years everything changes.” Payments and settlement “Payments will get embedded into every part of your life. If you have spent a bit too much on a night out, maybe an Alexa app will warn you next morning at breakfast to rearrange your finances to meet your next rent payment. And more and more of the apps will start working together.” “The world will become more customer-centric and more about creating amazing experiences. That’s all people will pay for. And the power will move from banks and financial institutions to people.” “The clunkiness, the disjointedness and all the problems of the traditional settlement systems are the barriers to entry into the business of these developing [fintech] giants. It takes a long time to figure it out, but once you do, you have a big advantage over the next competitor.” “It would be nice to see global payment systems being built by international consensus, that are state of the art and being deployed across multiple geographies at the same time. But you don’t even see that happening in one country, the US, let alone internationally. That’s the promise of blockchain, but those technologies are still very early in what could be a 50-year journey.” A massive power shift in finance “Out of the 30,000 banks globally that control the $15trn payments pie, only a few hundred will survive in a decade or two. But you’ll have a few large platforms and a few million apps.” “Almost anything that Facebook launches will be massively successful because of the size of their user base. But they have some serious trust issues. Especially when it comes to money, the trust factor is hugely important. Their new payments coin will probably end up working on a regional basis.” The new technology cold war and blockchain “If history’s any guide, the new technological world war between the US and China won’t be fought in those countries. It will be fought everywhere else, in Asia, Africa, Latin America and maybe in Europe.” “During the last cold war between the US and USSR, India tried pretty heroically not to be aligned with either side. Something similar is happening now in digital finance—India is pursuing a third way, not the US model of having no infrastructure, nor the Chinese model of a privately owned infrastructure, but building a state-of-the-art infrastructure as a public good.” “I do like to believe that the blockchains will get there. And if there is one global payments system, I hope no one owns it or controls it, that it’s open-access and blockchain-based.”
Payments in flux - an exclusive interview with the BIS
Morten Bech, head of the secretariat at the CPMI (Committee on Payments and Market Infrastructures), talks about innovations in payments, their influence on the financial infrastructure and the role of the official sector in guiding payments policy
The Hidden Politics of Cryptocurrencies
Paul Amery, editor of New Money Review, interviews Professor Donald MacKenzie of the University of Edinburgh. MacKenzie is a sociologist of science and technology. In this podcast he discusses what he calls the political economy of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies: how politics are made in cryptocurrency networks, the influence of protocol design on politics and how problems get resolved. Many of these questions are still open. In the podcast we discuss a recent article on cryptocurrency mining by MacKenzie in the London Review of Books, available here (http://www.sps.ed.ac.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0005/260969/Mining25.pdf)
POWERED BY BLUBRRY
