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In Episode 101 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with Michael Casey, an acclaimed author, journalist, researcher, and entrepreneur who currently serves as CEO and founder of Streambed Media, an early-stage video production and technology platform that seeks to optimize capital formation and creative output in the digital media industry. Michael is also chairman of CoinDesk\\u2019s advisory board and a senior advisor at the MIT Media Lab\\u2019s Digital Currency Initiative, where he has spearheaded research projects that employ blockchain technology to achieve social impact goals.

Michael Casey\\u2019s breadth of experience as a financial journalist for Dow Jones and the Wall Street Journal, as well as his time spent stationed overseas in Thailand and Argentina, provide him with a unique perspective on the \\u2018problem of trust\\u2019 and what he calls \\u2018the Internet\\u2019s original sin.\\u2019 The latter is a reference to the observation that the inventors of packet switching and the basic Web protocols did, according to Casey, \\u201ca masterful job figuring how to move information seamlessly across a distributed network. What they didn\\u2019t do was resolve the problem of trust.\\u201d \\u201cOn the one hand,\\u201d writes the chairman of CoinDesk\\u2019s advisory board, \\u201cthe distribution of public information was disintermediated, which put all centralized providers of that information, especially newspapers and other media outlets, under intense business pressure from blogs and other new information competitors. But on the other, all valuable information \\u2013 particularly money itself, an especially valuable form of information \\u2013 was still intermediated by trusted third parties.\\u201d

This intersection between money, communication, and trust serves as the basis for Demetri and Michael\\u2019s conversation during this episode. The two discuss Shoshana Zuboff\\u2019s work on Surveillance Capitalism, the loss of faith in financial institutions and central banks (including recent actions by the Federal Open Market Committee and the intervention by the Fed in the overnight Repo market), and how cryptocurrencies and distributed ledger technology aims to reinstill this lost faith by resolving the problem of trust.

The overtime to this week\\u2019s episode is an exhaustive exploration of the forces driving cryptocurrency adoption around the globe, the cultural impetus behind these forces, and the financial imperatives fueling Bitcoin\'s ascent as truly global money.

You can access the overtime, along with a transcript and rundown to this week\\u2019s episode through the Hidden Forces Patreon Page. All subscribers also gain access to the overtime RSS feed, which can be easily be added to your favorite podcast application.

Producer & Host: Demetri Kofinas

Editor & Engineer: Stylianos Nicolaou

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