How Bitcoin Empowers the Idea of Money – And Makes it Honest | Toni Lane Casserly | Big Think

How Bitcoin Empowers the Idea of Money – And Makes it Honest |

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Bitcoin will bring a seismic shift in global finance, says Toni Lane Casserly: "If you are an institution with integrity, generally I would say you don't have anything to worry about." ... So long to the world as we know it. Some of us are Bitcoin enthusiasts, while to others this digital currency exists in a far-off plane, spinning in the distant ether like Super Mario coins. To date, Bitcoin hasn’t impacted most of our daily lives – but according to Toni Lane Casserly, co-founder of CoinTelegraph, that’s going to change soon, and it’s going to change us.

As she explains Bitcoin and Blockchain, Casserly illuminates how digital currency empowers the idea of money, and does something that is hard to imagine: it makes money honest. Every transaction that happens on Blockchain is stored permanently as a public ledger – it cannot be erased or disguised. It is a completely transparent system, and it may finally provide the accountability that global financial systems have needed for centuries.

There’s an alarming quantity of red flags pointing to inequality and corruption within the world economy; it’s widely recognized, and yet it seems almost impossible to correct this established system without toppling it all together. Banks and financial institutions rely on one commodity to stay powerful: people’s trust. Trust is blindly handed over – because what’s the alternative? – then systematically abused for the benefit of just a few key players. When something is so systematically entrenched, Casserly says, it takes something radically new to force a paradigm shift.

It makes sense that Bitcoin could turn into a benevolent and democratic force: it was started by underground activists and anarchists, and it’s not the first time anarchy has evolved to become something oddly beautiful. Casserly draws an interesting comparison between Bitcoin and Burning Man: "What is Burning Man – the festival, the experience, the culture, the civilization – what is that other than the world's most evolved form of anarchy? Burning Man in the '70s were literally a bunch of awesome, cool anarchists going into the desert… and literally burning down the man." She continues, "I still don't think most people understand what is about to emerge in this modern technology landscape."

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TONI LANE CASSERLY :

Toni Lane Casserly is an American tech entrepreneur, artist and thought leader. She is a Young Star of Bitcoin and the co-founder of CoinTelegraph, the largest media network in the bitcoin and blockchain industries. She is a partner at BitNation.

As a philanthropist, Casserly co-founded Kids Compassion Charity when she funded a village to survive Ebola using bitcoin. As part of this endeavor, she put 14 children through school and has provided 14 orphans with a home.

Casserly currently works toward establishing digital currency economies, mesh internets and peaceful seasteads to help free citizens from the hands of war-torn, oppressive and corrupt leadership while preserving the planet. She serves as an advisor and/or board member to 6+ companies and funds as she simultaneously works in the field of human rights to establish digital currency economies, mesh networks and alternative governance structures in countries ruled by oppressive leaders and corrupt jurisdiction. She has been affectionately entitled “The Joan of Arc of Bitcoin” by her peers and various publications.

In the art sphere, Casserly is a recording artist and the founder of the “immateralism” (post art) movement, where she uses consciousness and lucid dreaming as a medium.

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TRANSCRIPT :

Toni Lane Casserly: Bitcoin is the Internet of money. And I say that Bitcoin is the Internet of money not because Bitcoin in and of itself is the Internet but because Bitcoin empowers for the idea of money what the Internet was able to do with information. And in doing that it gives any person in the world the ability to quantify, create, store and share the idea of value in a way that we as a human race have never really been able to do before. And Bitcoin is to Blockchain as email is to the Internet. It is the first major use case of a technology that is so fundamentally going to change the way that we think about our everyday life that it will transform every interaction we have from inception on.

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