Money Reimagined: Letter to President Biden
President Biden needs to reform the global financial system and avoid a 1930s-style depression. Digital currencies can help.
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Updated Jan 22, 2021 at 9:46 p.m. UTC
Money Reimagined: Letter to President Biden
Welcome to this week’s Money Reimagined, coming to you two days into a new U.S. presidency.
Already, with various executive orders and a host of cabinet and agency nominee names emerging, President Joe Biden has fostered the palpable sense of a slate being cleaned.
As for what it means for crypto, the turnover in the White House gave Sheila Warren and me reason to invite Kristin Smith of the Blockchain Association and Amy Kim of the Digital Chamber of Commerce onto our weekly podcast. We discussed the outlook for regulation under the Biden administration. Check out the episode. But first, read the newsletter, which starts with an open letter to the new U.S. president.
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On this episode of “Money Reimagined” the discussion comes home for an insider’s 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 Commodity Futures Trading Commission chairman and founding principal of the Digital Dollar Foundation.
“My background is really 20 years of working on the internet,” said Marvin Ammori. “And I remember in the early days of the internet, 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.
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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.
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.
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?
Privacy, Social Media and the Reinvention of Company Towns
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Dec 18, 2020
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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.
Updated Dec 16, 2020 at 7:11 p.m. UTC
Experiments in Crypto’s Governance Lab
Two hundred and thirty-three years ago, a group gathered in Philadelphia. Fifty-five men entered the red brick Pennsylvania state house, shuttered the windows and embarked upon a rare sort of work: defining how they would govern and be governed. For 100 days they debated, compromised, drafted, edited, and debated some more. In the end, on Sept. 17, 1787, they emerged with the United States Constitution.
It is worth noting this was not the first attempt. The gathering in 1787 was first initiated with the intention of revising the Articles of Confederation, America’s first constitution that had been ratified six years prior. That constitution, however, was proving weak and lacking the teeth necessary for enforcement. As the Constitutional Convention kicked off, the conversation quickly turned from revising the old articles to scrapping them and starting over.