Money, trust, and inclusion · 2018-10-23 · Affiliate faculty Dept. of Human Centered Design &...
Transcript of Money, trust, and inclusion · 2018-10-23 · Affiliate faculty Dept. of Human Centered Design &...
Scott D. Mainwaring, Ph.D.
Affiliate faculty
Dept. of Human Centered Design & Engineering (HCDE)
College of Engineering, University of Washington
Money, trust, and inclusion
The social life of money
A clay tablet with cuneiform inscription from Anatolia circa
1875-1840 B.C. Money started with receipts and ledgers, not
barter.
archaeologynewsnetwork.blogspot.com/2017/11/cuneiform-
tablets-provide-clues-on.html
From kevinmd.com/blog/2014/12/dear-hmo-dont-want-
money.html
Let’s make our own money
One Fundred Dollars.
Hand drawn by the
artist J.S.G. Boggs
(1955-2017). See
Boggs: A Comedy of
Values by Lawrence
Weschler.
One and one-half hour
RiverHOURS notes (front
and back), complementary
currency produced by the
Gorge Local Currency
Cooperative (GLCC).
riverhoursalternate.weebly.
com
Digital money
First plastic magstipe credit card, 1969
Edy Felica cash card, launched 2001 Safaricom M-PESA mobile money
system, launched in Kenya 2007
Meiwaku and tokushita!
Comment on Yelp, 7/4/15: “To this genius holding
up the line while playing on his phone, I hope
your sub gives you explosive diarrhea. okinawa.stripes.com/news/jackpot-pachinko-can-get-you-
hooked-japan
Tokyo Metro at rush hour. Photo by Tim Adams (Wikimedia).
Money games
QQ, Tencent’s penguin
mascot, with Q Coins
A wang ba (网吧 - internet café) in China. Photo from
https://technode.com/2014/09/30/a-new-age-for-chinese-
internet-cafes/ More Monopoly money ($30 “billion”) is
printed each year than real money.
Photo: Jibril Sulaiman, USA Today
Blockchain dreams
Lana Swartz Asst. Prof. of Media Studies,
University of Virginia
Website: llaannaa.com
Lana Swartz. 2017. Blockchain dreams: Imagining techno-economic alternatives after Bitcoin. In Manual
Castells (ed.), Another Economy is Possible: Culture and Economy in a Time of Crisis. Wiley.
Radical dreams
• Futurity – “if we don’t dream the future
now, someone else will”
• Decentralization and disintermediation
• “the logical conclusion of the Internet”
• Doing away with trust in “middle men”
(governments, payment networks, …)
• The autonomous and the automated
• Doing away with humans
• Trust in “incorruptible” algorithms
The incorporative blockchain
• More boring, realizable dreams of the
banking and technology industries
• Efficiency; compliance (KYC/AML)
The Civil experiment
Jen Poyant and Manoush Zomorodi
“ZigZag is a podcast about changing
the course of capitalism, journalism,
and women’s lives. For real.”
Stable Genius Productions - one of the
“newsrooms” running on CIVIL
zigzagpod.com and civil.co
theverge.com/2018/10/17/17991296/civil-
failed-token-sale-blockchain-media-ethereum
One of the first consumer-facing ICOs
Needed to raise $8m; raised $1.4m
($375,000 from 3000 consumers)
The grey zone
Financial inclusion
• An unrealized (and unprofitable?)
dream
• Big usability issues – access isn’t
enough
• Real needs, though
• The unbanked and under-banked in
Oregon
• Funding for small businesses
• Lower card fees for merchants
Can the blockchain help?
If it can, it won’t be without
intermediaries
bankonoregon.org
More
10/12/18 Episode:
Full Faith & Credit
Featuring Neha Nerula (MIT)
and Bill Maurer (UC Irvine)
A nonprofit organization committed to
creating equal, open and inclusive
opportunities in the blockchain industry.
diversityinblockchain.com