The Blockchain Socialist

This week I spoke with Morshed Mannan (@MannanMorshed), a PhD candidate at Leiden Law School in The Netherlands and Research Fellow at the Institute for the Cooperative Digital Economy at The New School. His research interest in cooperatives and digital technologies eventually led him to blockchain and he's produced some really interesting research and seminars on its intersection.
During the interview we discuss his previously published research about the differences between trust and confidence on the blockchain and link that to his work about cooperatives, we revisit two projects that were on the podcast previously (Eva Coop and Colony), and discuss how blockchain and coops have similar properties while also having a lot to learn from one another. At some point we also agree that cooperatives may be a good way to take entrepreneurship away from the right wing.
Sources:

• Blockchain as a confidence machine: The problem of trust & challenges of governance
• Fostering Worker Cooperatives with Blockchain Technology: Lessons from the Colony Project
• Everything Old is New Again: Evaluating the Legal and Governance Structures of Shared-Services Platform Cooperatives (Unpublished but will be published here soon)
• TBS Interview with Colony
• TBS Interview with Eva Coop

If you liked the podcast be sure to give it a review on your preferred podcast platform. If you want to see more content like this, please consider donating to my Patreon starting at just $3 per month . At the moment I’ve spent more on this 9-month old project than I’ve ever made so any amount helps. Also, sign up for the Newsletter, follow me on Twitter (@TBSocialist), and join the r/CryptoLeftists subreddit to continue the discussion and give your thoughts.

Send me your questions or comments about the show and I'll read them out sometime.

Support the show

ICYMI I've written a book about, no surprise, blockchains through a left political framework! The title is Blockchain Radicals: How Capitalism Ruined Crypto and How to Fix It and is being published through Repeater Books, the publishing house started by Mark Fisher who’s work influenced me a lot in my thinking.
The book is officially published and you use this linktree to find where you can purchase the book based on your region / country.

This week I spoke to Alleza Howitt (@aleezagroks), a contributor to the Trustlines protocol. Trustlines is a mPoS (minimal viable Proof of Stake) sidechain to Ethereum and stores transactions for a system of decentralized mutual credit. Mutual credit is an alternative medium of exchange to most money that we use today in which "money" is created through lines of credit that are established between people who trust each other.
In this episode we discuss how Trustlines works from the smallest unit of mutual credit to an entire decentralized network of economic actors using mutual credit, why the Left should care about such an alternative monetary system, and the circumstances in which you may want to consider using this type of system yourself. If you have a community that would be interested in using decentralized mutual credit, reach out to Aleeza on Twitter and she'll help set you up!
Learn more about Trustlines
Trustlines 101
Trustlines App
Using Trustlines for time credits
If you liked the podcast be sure to give it a review on your preferred podcast platform. If you want to see more content like this, please consider donating to my Patreon starting at just $3 per month . At the moment I’ve spent more on this 9-month old project than I’ve ever made so any amount helps. Also, sign up for the Newsletter, follow me on Twitter (@TBSocialist), and join the r/CryptoLeftists subreddit to continue the discussion and give your thoughts.

Send me your questions or comments about the show and I'll read them out sometime.

Support the show

ICYMI I've written a book about, no surprise, blockchains through a left political framework! The title is Blockchain Radicals: How Capitalism Ruined Crypto and How to Fix It and is being published through Repeater Books, the publishing house started by Mark Fisher who’s work influenced me a lot in my thinking.
The book is officially published and you use this linktree to find where you can purchase the book based on your region / country.

This is Part 2 of my interview with Dr. Joel Z Garrod, a sociologist based in Canada and author of a recently published article, “On the property of blockchains: comments on an emerging literature.” The paper focuses on blockchain and property relations in connection to global property relations and the evolution of capitalism.

For this part of the interview we speak about our thoughts on a recent DeFi Summit seminar on Human Rights (unsurprisingly, they use a very limited liberal conception of human rights), the evolution of property during the transition from Feudalism to Capitalism, and what lessons we can take from that for building something else.

In the last interview we spoke about utopian capitalism, whether blockchain is a neoliberal project, and the history of contracts. The interview itself went pretty long so I’ve split it into two parts. It's not necessary to listen to the first part if you've found this part first but you can find Part 1 here.

If you’d like to get a copy of the article you join the Crypto Leftists Discord group here where I posted a copy of the article since online it’s under a paywall.

If you liked the podcast be sure to give it a review on your preferred podcast platform. If you want to see more content like this, please consider donating to my Patreon. I will never have ads to keep independence. If you want to receive irregular updates, sign up for the Newsletter, follow me on Twitter (@TBSocialist), and / or join the r/CryptoLeftists subreddit to continue the discussion and give your thoughts.

Send me your questions or comments about the show and I'll read them out sometime.

Support the show

ICYMI I've written a book about, no surprise, blockchains through a left political framework! The title is Blockchain Radicals: How Capitalism Ruined Crypto and How to Fix It and is being published through Repeater Books, the publishing house started by Mark Fisher who’s work influenced me a lot in my thinking.
The book is officially published and you use this linktree to find where you can purchase the book based on your region / country.

This week I spoke with Paula Berman (@_paulaberman), researcher at the Democracy Earth Foundation (@DemocracyEarth) which is a tech non-profit that aims to create platforms for decentralized and incorruptible online governance. Their projects have largely been based on Ethereum.

In the interview we discuss the identity problem for decentralized platforms like blockchain, the advantages of quadratic voting as opposed to current systems, and why the Left should care about all these things.

Sign up for the Blockchain 101 for Socialists Live Session

Eventbrite: www.eventbrite.com/e/blockchain-10...m_term=fullLink
Newsletter: theblockchainsocialist.com/sign-up-for...newsletter/

Discord: discord.gg/Hs78cVM

Want to stay in touch?

Check the site -> theblockchainsocialist.com/

Join the community -> www.reddit.com/r/cryptoleftists/

Contribute to the project -> www.patreon.com/theblockchainsocialist

Other Platforms:

Spotify: open.spotify.com/show/3geORcile9E...hURsSBlErXnihh9A

iTunes: podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-...st/id1501607045

Soundcloud: @theblockchainsocialist

Stitcher: www.stitcher.com/podcast/the-blockchain-socialist

Podcast Addict: podplayer.net/?podId=2598359

Deezer: www.deezer.com/us/show/961422

Podchaser:

Send me your questions or comments about the show and I'll read them out sometime.

Support the show

ICYMI I've written a book about, no surprise, blockchains through a left political framework! The title is Blockchain Radicals: How Capitalism Ruined Crypto and How to Fix It and is being published through Repeater Books, the publishing house started by Mark Fisher who’s work influenced me a lot in my thinking.
The book is officially published and you use this linktree to find where you can purchase the book based on your region / country.

This episode is a continuation of the CCG Chronicles series which is a collection of interviews conducted during the Crypto Commons Gathering (CCG) in Austria back in August 2021. The interviews were also filmed to potentially be a part of a documentary I'm making with a few others.

During the CCG I interviewed Scott Morris (@CS_Morris) and Moritz Bierling (@bierlingm) about how to design a new currency system, blockchain vs. holochain, and memes. Scott is a currency design consultant working in both crypto and non-crypto based currencies focused on cooperative finance. We talked a bit about a TedX talk he gave titled "Putting people and the planet before paper wealth". Moritz works a lot in the Holochain ecosystem and has his own newsletter here.

If you want to financially support our efforts in making the documentary, you can donate so far with bitcoin, ethereum (any layer), or NEAR at the addresses listed on the website. We’re still unsure when exactly anything will be published, but we’re hoping within the next year although that will depend on the amount of support we can get from the community.

If you liked the podcast be sure to give it a review on your preferred podcast platform. If you find content like this important consider donating to my Patreon starting at just $3 per month . It takes quite a lot of my time and resources so any amount helps. Follow me on Twitter (@TBSocialist) and join the r/CryptoLeftists subreddit and Discord to join the discussion.

Send me your questions or comments about the show and I'll read them out sometime.

Support the show

ICYMI I've written a book about, no surprise, blockchains through a left political framework! The title is Blockchain Radicals: How Capitalism Ruined Crypto and How to Fix It and is being published through Repeater Books, the publishing house started by Mark Fisher who’s work influenced me a lot in my thinking.
The book is officially published and you use this linktree to find where you can purchase the book based on your region / country.