Bitcoin and the Future of Decentralized Finance

03/31/21 • 50 min

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Meltem Demirors, Chief Strategy Officer at CoinShares, joins Azeem Azhar to explore the potential and politics of cryptocurrencies: from the ideological origins of Bitcoin to the new wave of decentralized financial products that could disrupt traditional finance.

They also discuss:

Why the values of the Cypherpunk community are enshrined in Bitcoin’s design.
How the Decentralized Finance movement is re-imagining existing products on blockchain networks.
If Bitcoin will ever break out of its niche to become a widely used currency.

@Melt_Dem
@azeem
@ExponentialView

Further resources:

“Is the financial establishment coming round to bitcoin?” (The Economist, 2021)
“Get ready for self-driving banks” (Financial Times, 2021)
“The Redecentralized Web” (Exponential View podcast, 2020)
“Politics, Power & Protocols” (Meltem Demirors, CoinShares 2019)

They also discuss:

Why the values of the Cypherpunk community are enshrined in Bitcoin’s design.
How the Decentralized Finance movement is re-imagining existing products on blockchain networks.
If Bitcoin will ever break out of its niche to become a widely used currency.

@Melt_Dem
@azeem
@ExponentialView

Further resources:

“Is the financial establishment coming round to bitcoin?” (The Economist, 2021)
“Get ready for self-driving banks” (Financial Times, 2021)
“The Redecentralized Web” (Exponential View podcast, 2020)
“Politics, Power & Protocols” (Meltem Demirors, CoinShares 2019)

Previous Episode

The Evolution of Teamwork (with Atlassian CEO Scott Farquhar)

Atlassian, the enterprise software innovator, is helping to drive disruption across the world of work. Co-founder and co-CEO, Scott Farquhar, joins Azeem Azhar to explain how, during a global pandemic, they nearly doubled the size of their workforce, why the workplace will never be the same after Covid-19, and what the implications are for companies and employees who increasingly operate remotely, asynchronously, and in flatter hierarchies.

They also discuss:

Why Farquhar believes that most companies are becoming like software companies, where the CEO and CIO are in strategic lock-step and ready to disrupt their business before they are disrupted by competitors.
Why companies are shifting their team structures from being project-based to product-based.
Why Farquhar believes his approach to company-building is akin to gardening.

@scottfarkas
@azeem
@ExponentialView

Further resources:

“Empowering Workers in the Digital Future” (Exponential View podcast, 2020)
“WFH Doesn’t Have to Dilute Your Corporate Culture” (Harvard Business Review, 2021)
“Picking the Right Approach to Digital Collaboration” (MIT Sloan, 2021)

Next Episode

Making Quantum Computers a Commercial Reality

IonQ is the first company solely focused on quantum computing to go public, with its quantum computers accessible via the cloud today. The company’s co-founder/chief scientist Chris Monroe and president/CEO Peter Chapman join Azeem Azhar to explore how they turned cutting-edge research into a scalable product. They also discuss the engineering challenges that remain before quantum systems not only surpass the fastest supercomputers, but also become widely available.

In addition, they address:

Why IonQ, unlike Google and IBM, have bet on the “trapped ion” approach to building quantum computers.
How major software innovation could move quantum computing forward.
Why quantum computers excel at optimization problems involving more variables than classical computers can accommodate.

@IonQ_Inc
@azeem
@ExponentialView