Shermin Voshmgir, director of the Research Institute for Crypto Economics at the Vienna University of Economics and founder of BlockchainHub, was our guest at the second Money Talk on Februrary 20, 2018.  In her amazing lecture „Token Economy – The Future of Curencies?“ she was sharing her thoughts on the token economy and the roles and functions of money:

There is a widespread misconception that Bitcoin and tokens that have derived from similar technologies, are currencies comparable to fiat currencies like EUR, USD, etc. This talk points out why Bitcoin and other crypto tokens are not currencies in the traditional sense, but rather a new asset which has more similarities to commodity money rather than to fiat money. It is furthermore an operating system for a new type of economy with distributed governance that can transcendent geographic boundaries of nation states. The biggest challenge that we face, when we are trying to explain or discuss Bitcoin, Blockchain and Tokens, is that we are trying to explain new phenomena with old terminology that sometimes don’t do justice to the full range of possibilities that these new technologies have to offer. While it might be counterproductive to call Bitcoin a currency, it does have similarities with money as we know it. But what are the roles and functions of money, and can a token economy eradicate the monopoly of nation states to issue money?

Check the video of Shermin’s talk here: