From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
I fully believe the future of financial infrastructure will be built on blockchain. We handle around US$5 billion per day for all transactions, around 3x more than PayPal. This is only the beginning.
To take the example to an extreme, consider how many real estate or private equity transactions are currently executed by a computer versus a human being. Being an 'alpha-less market maker' in such a market is not possible.
The inconvenient-truth of this situation is that however many observers and commentators espouse rhetoric about solutions for this crisis, without buy-in from the individuals who are responsible for our economy? those words are in vain.
We needed to shift the media economy off a dependence on online advertising, and we needed to change who the customer is. Both things are possible with paid subscriptions because it's trust rather than content that gets monetised.
...a more dangerous situation now than in 2008
Money gets inside us; it creates our perceptions and changes the way we operate. It changes the people among whom we are, and who we are. When we're not in touch with that reality, it can change us in heinous ways.
Sovereign debt is reasonably unique in that there are no underlying assets one can claim unlike corporate bonds.
We run the very real risk now, not of going back to the 1970s, but of going back to the 1930s or 40s with economic and financial collapse, massive pandemic, and real-world wars.
Our system has never defined what it means to be 'good' – what is the ideal human being in capitalism? Is it Jeff Bezos? Is it Steve Jobs? They thrived, they profited, are they 'moral'? The ideal human profile of capitalism does not fit with our basic human dignity.
We have made money, capital, materialism and consumption into our God, it's a disease – you could call it affluenza. It is perhaps because of this context that humanity has lost its way, and the consideration of human rights has been subordinated to the interests of a handful of powerful people who sit at the top of the pyramid.
Time wealth is all about having the freedom to decide how you spend your time, who you spend it with, where you spend it, and what you trade it for. It boils down to one simple truth: recognizing time as your most precious asset—the only thing you can never get back.
Unless women have the chance to take up an active role in our economies and fulfil their potential, our ambitions for a fairer and more prosperous world simply won't be realised.