Crypto Talks from CoinDesk

This episode is sponsored by ErisX, The Stellar Development Foundation and Grayscale Digital Large Cap Investment Fund.

A pandemic becomes the catalyst for a global markets sell-off and potentially another ‘greater’ recession. From the U.S. Federal Reserve to Venezuela; the Bank of England to 1 Hacker Way, the question of what constitutes money and who controls it are more urgent than ever. Join Michael J. Casey and Naomi Brockwell as they speak with a number of leading lights in crypto and finance in Money Reimagined.

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Our digital personas are becoming the primary way we interact with the world, particularly during this worldwide pandemic. But we only see a tiny bit of the information being captured while we’re online, and we rarely know what our personal data is being used for. While the majority of our economy is related to our personal data, there’s no interface to help us understand what we actually look like to data collectors and their customers.

Welcome to a reboot of CoinDesk Live: Lockdown Edition, a livestream series in which CoinDesk journalists and virtual audience members chat with speakers from Consensus: Distributed, our first virtual conference May 11-15.

In this kickoff episode, CoinDesk journalist Bailey Reutzel speaks with Alex McDougall of Bicameral Ventures about the data trails we leave behind when we surf the internet, and how users can take back some control of that data.

https://twitter.com/CoinDesk/status/1250888281576914951

Bailey and Alex discuss:

• Free apps like House Party that collect our information
• Project MetaMe, Alex’s single sign-on mechanism that brings back all the data on other platforms, allowing people to manage and even sell it themselves
• Contract tracing, a necessary evil, or just evil?
• Is the Apple-Google solution the worst of all worlds, with an option to opt out as well as trusting mediocre data stewards?
• As health data is clearly valuable to Google, many people simply don’t trust Google with their health data
• Pros and cons of these privacy tools such as DuckDuckGo, Brave Browser, Ghostery, Lockdown, and Loginhood
• The book “Surveillance Capitalism”
• Dystopian Fiction
• The book “Snow Crash”
• zkSNARKS for data
• How self-soverign meta-versions of ourselves might help protect us from “lizard brain” manipulation, by providing cleaner thinking versions of ourselves
• The book Alex is working on, “The Lizard and the Machine: Maintaining Human Integrity at a Machine-Speed World”

Alex McDougall on Twitter: @AlexM_Bicameral

Bailey Reutzel on Twitter: @BLR13

Next up

Sign up to join the next CoinDesk Live on Tuesday, April 21, with Priyanka Desai and Aaron Wright from The Lao as we discuss for-profit DAOs.

Then join us at Consensus: Distributed May 11-15.

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

We're preparing for Consenus 2019, the world's largest blockchain conference, with weekly interview of influencers, developers, entrepreneurs, regulators, and stakeholders from all over the crypto sphere. Join host Nolan Bauerle for a weekly look at where the space is and where it's headed.

And don't forget to pick up Consensus tickets at coindesk.com/events

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

In our CoinDesk Live: Lockdown Edition series, CoinDesk journalists and virtual audience members chat with speakers from Consensus: Distributed, our upcoming virtual conference on May 11-15.

In this episode, CoinDesk managing editor Zack Seward and business reporter Nikhilesh De speak with Magdalena Gronowska, who lost a couple thousand dollars when Canadian crypto exchange QuadrigaCX imploded. She's now a member of the Official Committee of Affected Users and the Bankruptcy Board of Inspectors.

QuadrigaCX is one of the stories in crypto that'll end up getting made into a movie; there's been so many twists and turns, and there still remains mystery, after the exchange's CEO, Gerald Cotten, unexpectedly died (although some believe he faked his death) on a trip to India in late 2018. He was supposedly the only person that held the keys to some $190 million in user funds – a pile of money that has been in dispute ever since. But once Canadian authorities started their investigation, it became clear that Cotten had also mismanaged client funds in many, many ways.

It's been a little over a year since Cotten's death was reported, setting off a whirlwind investigation, and Gronowska gives insight into where the case stands today.

Topics include:

• How much it sucks to lose bitcoin when you're trying to stack sats.
• How the Committee of Affected Users operates.
• The role of the Bankruptcy Board of Inspectors.
• The craziest thing QuadrigaCX's now-deceased CEO Gerald Cotten bought with his ill-gotten gains.
• Would you rather be a MtGox creditor or QuadrigaCX creditor?
• NDAs: what the committee knows and doesn't know.
• How the crypto community's sleuthing actually helps the case.
• Brass-tacks questions from creditors.
• Not your keys; not your coins.
• Everyone's favorite: regulation. And the silver lining to the QuadrigaCX disaster: Canadians, both the crypto community and the government, thinking harder about crafting appropriate regulations.
• Another industry where tech, maybe even blockchain tech, could be beneficial: Canada's insolvency system.
• What happens next?
• $40 million CAD has been retrieved. Where does that money go and how will they recover the rest?

Next up:

Sign up to join the next CoinDesk Live on Tuesday, April 28 with Carlos Acevedo, founder of the Crypto Community Project, which is dedicated to educating low-income communities on crypto and blockchain.Acevedo is also the director of sales and the regional lead for Latin America at Brave.

And then, of course, join us at Consensus: Distributed May 11-15 where Acevedo will be speaking.

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It's tough out there for a blockchain startup trying to raise money.

Not only has interest in crypto and blockchain projects tapered off some over the past year or so of declining coin prices, but traditional venture capital has pivoted to focus on funding businesses that in some way overlap with the new normal of lockdowns, remote work and public health crises.

But the blockchain space has proved itself innovative as it relates to sussing out hidden capital. (Remember the ICO boom? Doesn't that feel like a decade ago?)

In our livestream series reboot of CoinDesk Live: Lockdown Edition, CoinDesk journalists and virtual audience members chat with speakers from Consensus: Distributed, our first virtual conference May 11-15.

In this episode, CoinDesk business editor Zack Seward speaks with Aaron Wright and Priyanka Desai of OpenLaw, a company that plans to launch a for-profit DAO next week. What does that even mean? Digging into the structure of this new limited liability autonomous organization, dubbed The LAO, is just one of the topics in this week's episode.

Other topics include:

• LAOs as the next chapter of capital formation
• Novel use cases for DAOs
• How non-accredited investors can get involved in The LAO
• Funding technology, such as privacy-enhancing tech, that traditional venture capitalists have been hesitant to
• Tokenizing individuals
• The continued interest in non-fungible tokens or NFTs
• DeFi downside risk mitigators, like insurance, which are going to become more important as hacks and thefts continue
• DeFi's open and participatory nature overlapping with broader internet trends
• Rage quitting or redeploying your capital where it suits you
• Governance whales
• Limiting the consolidation of powers
• Digital first work environments
• DAOS for content creation
• And finally: "There should be a bitcoin DAO!"

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