What the GameStop Saga Says About US Capitalism

02/05/21 • 51 min

There’s a reason the Gamestop/WallStreetBets drama of the past two weeks got so much attention. It’s because it speaks forcefully to the inequities and systemic problems in both our financial markets and the internet economy and how they’ve shaped our politics and social tensions.

So, in true Money Reimagined form, we wanted to have a super high-level discussion about what all this means for the future of money and society. And for that we called on someone who is a master at drawing big-picture narratives around such issues: Demetri Kofinas, the host of the popular Hidden Forces podcast.

Demetri Kofinas is an insatiably curious media entrepreneur and financial expert. His mission is to make the connections that help you see the bigger picture, empowering you to make smarter investing decisions.

He also hosts the Hidden Forces podcast, where he gives his listeners an edge by using his critical thinking approach to challenge the consensus narratives structuring our world .

You can follow him on Twitter at @kofinas, check out his podcast at hiddenforces.io, and sign-up for more in depth content and analysis at Patreon.com/hiddenforces.

Find Michael Casey on Twitter or Clubhouse (@mikejcasey)

Find Sheila Warren on Twitter or Clubhouse (@sheilaw)

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He also hosts the Hidden Forces podcast, where he gives his listeners an edge by using his critical thinking approach to challenge the consensus narratives structuring our world .

You can follow him on Twitter at @kofinas, check out his podcast at hiddenforces.io, and sign-up for more in depth content and analysis at Patreon.com/hiddenforces.

Find Michael Casey on Twitter or Clubhouse (@mikejcasey)

Find Sheila Warren on Twitter or Clubhouse (@sheilaw)

Image Credit:Luke Stackpoole/Unsplash modified by CoinDesk

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

Previous Episode

Strange Bedfellows: The World Economic Forum and Crypto

For this episode, we travel, metaphorically, to a town in the Swiss Alps that’s for the first time in 50 years experiencing some peace and quiet in January.

This week was the World Economic Forum’s “Davos Agenda,” a conference filled with the usual roster of high-powered speakers but conducted entirely virtually, over Zoom, instead of in Davos. So, as Sheila took time out from helping run that agenda, we invited her colleague Adrian Monck, a long-time WEF managing director, to reflect on the forum’s past and future and how something as anti-establishment as cryptocurrency and blockchain is being integrated into its work.

It might come as a shock to the rebellious strain that’s prominent in the crypto community, but its world and that of the WEF have some important similarities. Both must grapple with the core problem of governance in a decentralized environment, with the difficulty of solving problems that serve the interests of the whole when there’s no single party in charge. Both of them grapple with the problem of consensus.

As Adrian explains, the WEF tries to resolve this by using its unparalleled convening power. It brings together disparate decision-makers from governments, businesses and civil society so they can find common ground on how to address the world’s many urgent needs.

At times, that convening exercise has involved inviting radical newcomers, such as the internet tech community, into the tent. In this wide-ranging discussion, which partly delves into Sheila’s groundbreaking work introducing blockchain ideas to the WEF, we dive into the current challenge for this evolving process: how to bring the crypto disruptors inside.

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Next Episode

In The Age of Ethereum, What Comes Next?

This week’s Money Reimagined dives into the increasingly urgently needed Ethereum 2.0 upgrade. What is it and why does it matter?

We talk with Danny Ryan, a researcher at the Ethereum Foundation. He has become a key player in the complicated “herding the cats” task of “herding the cats” of getting thousands of different stakeholders in this vibrant decentralized community aligned enough to undertake the massive 2.0 transition with sufficient cohesion.

With Danny’s help we break the whole thing down in a way that’s accessible to people beyond the developer community: Proof-of-stake consensus, sharding, Layer 2, and how decision-making and development happens in this free-wheeling open-source environment.

We put it all in the context of a giant boom for the Ethereum ecosystem, as money pours into red-hot decentralized finance (DeFi), as a mania for non-fungible tokens (NFTs) plays out, and as ether hits new all-time highs as large institutions gain exposure via new CME futures. All this is bringing into stark relief the urgent need to advance the system’s scalability as congestion on the network is driving up transactions costs, or “gas fees” to unsustainable levels.

It’s a timely episode, in other words. Have a listen.

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