Ari Juels is the Weill Family Foundation and Joan and Sanford I. Weill Professor in the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute at Cornell Tech and the Technion and a Computer Science faculty member at Cornell University. He is a Co-Director of the Initiative for CryptoCurrencies and Contracts (IC3). Critics of blockchain often say that it is nothing more than a database, but today’s guest, Ari Juels, has a different opinion. His technical expertise (he is a Professor of Computer Science at Cornell Tech), combined with his ability to understand both sides of a divisive topic like this one, make for a very insightful conversation about Bitcoin, NFTs, and smart contracts.

In this episode, we speak to Chris DeRose, software developer and former co-host of the Bitcoin Uncensored podcast, about both the downsides and upsides of cryptocurrencies and the associated technologies. Chris created an excellent series of podcast episodes on cryptocurrencies that ended in 2017.

Vili Lehdonvirta is Professor of Economic Sociology and Digital Social Research at the Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford. He is the author of "Cloud Empires: How Digital Platforms Are Overtaking the State and How We Can Regain Control" (MIT Press, 2022) and "Virtual Economies: Design and Analysis" (MIT Press, 2014). We discuss the role of states in scaling markets, how states and platform companies differ, the impacts of smart contracts on governance issues, and how control and power are centralized within crypto markets, as well as the social implications of blockchain technology.

John Cochrane is a repeat guest on the Rational Reminder. He is an economist specializing in financial economics and macroeconomics. His most recent work is on the Fiscal Theory of the Price Level which gets to the core of what money is and why it is valuable. In this episode, we take a deep dive into the concept of money. We learn what numeraire is, how a numeraire is defined, and what determines its value relative to goods. We also discuss and unpack the differences between fiscal theory and monetarist theory, along with other ideas regarding the value of money. We tie all of this back to cryptocurrencies, and sprinkle in some discussion on political freedom.

William Magnuson is an associate professor at Texas A&M Law School. His book Blockchain Democracy: Technology, Law and the Rule of the Crowd gives an incredible overview of cryptocurrencies through the lens of legal scholarship. In this episode we discuss the political and economic philosophies of decentralization and the history of the Cypherpunks and digital cash. We also dig into the nuances of theories of crime, social norms, and anonymity, the challenges in applying existing legal frameworks to new technologies, and the effect of cryptocurrencies on the legal system.

David Gerard is a staunch critic of cryptocurrencies and blockchain. He writes the cryptocurrency and blockchain news site Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain and authored the 2017 book Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain: Bitcoin, Blockchain, Ethereum & Smart Contracts. David has become an authority on the topic and has briefed the UK House of Commons Science and Technology Committee on the technology. He does not mince words and is clear that he sees absolutely nothing useful about crypto, but sees many negative externalities.

Quinn DuPont is the author of Cryptocurrencies and Blockchains (Polity) (and other academic publications), Associate Editor Frontiers in Blockchains, Education Chair IEEE Blockchain Initiative and IEEE TEMS, Research Fellow at University College London’s Center for Blockchain Technologies, and Affiliate of The Future of Money Research Collaborative. He sees potential for cryptocurrencies and blockchain to facilitate forms of economic and social organization that were not previously possible. Quinn is not a skeptic when it comes to crypto, but he does thoughtfully approach the topic as a scientist, and, unlike many proponents, deliberately avoids conflicts of interest.

Hilary J. Allen is a Professor at the American University Washington College of Law, where she teaches courses in corporate law and financial regulation. She has published numerous articles on fintech and financial stability regulation in academic journals, including DeFi: Shadow Banking 2.0? which compares DeFi to the financial innovations related to the Great Financial Crisis. Professor Allen also worked with the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission appointed by Congress to study the causes of the financial crisis of 2008. Her book, Driverless Finance, details the relationship between financial innovation and financial stability.

This is a rebroadcast of a portion of our 2021 episode with Professor Campbell Harvey, a giant in traditional finance. This conversation was the genesis block our our Understanding Crypto series. When Professor Harvey expressed his excitement for what crypto and DeFi can do, we realized we needed to take it seriously. This conversation had our heads spinning the first time around, but after the preceding eight episodes in this series we are better equipped to assess Professor Harvey’s claims.

Tim O’Reilly is a well-known educator and publisher in the crypto community and the Founder, CEO, and Chairman of O'Reilly Media. He has been involved in the technology industry since the inception and rise of Silicon Valley and, with over 35 years of industry experience, he is known for popularizing the terms ‘open-source software’ and ‘Web 2.0’ and is a respected commentator on the space. In today’s show, we do a lot of looking backwards with Tim and draw insight from his vast experience in the industry to discuss what the future of cryptocurrencies holds.

Dr. Nicholas Weaver’s well-known lectures on cryptocurrencies explain why he believes it needs to be “burned with fire.” Today, we speak to Dr. Weaver, an expert in computer science and a long-time observer of the cryptocurrency space. We talk about decentralization, if cryptocurrencies are achieving it, and the underlying concept of blockchain technology, as well as whether or not blockchains are secure and what the potential benefits of cryptocurrencies are to developing countries, and lots more.

Bruce Schneier is an internationally-renowned security technologist, author, and educator. The focus of his work is the intersection of security, technology and people. Examples of his well-known books include Liars and Outliers and Data and Goliath, which provide much-needed insight to readers about trust, data, monopolies, and regulation. Bruce lectures in public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School and is a fellow at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society. In our conversation, we discuss decentralization, trust, regulation, and much more,

Stephen Diehl has emerged as a vocal critic of cryptocurrency. He approaches the topic from the perspective of a software developer who works with financial technology within the finance sector and has a good grasp on how it should and should not work. We talk through the basics of the crypto ecosystem, the reasons Stephen is critical of it, and his motivation to spread the skepticism.

In this episode we speak with Tobin Hanspal, an assistant professor of finance at Vienna University of Economics and Business (VU Vienna). His research focuses on how experiences, beliefs, and advances in financial technology affect the decision making process of households and individual investors, and has been published in leading finance and economics journals. We discuss the characteristics and behavior of investors who were early to adopt exchange listed crypto investment products, and some of Tobin’s research on how expectations and experiences with risky investments affect investor behavior.

Today we speak with Eswar Prasad, the Tolani Senior Professor of Trade Policy and Professor of Economics at Cornell University. He is also a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution. We discuss the current monetary and financial system, how money is created, what limits money creation, and whether “hard money” like gold is a good thing. We then shift to crypto and discuss what, if anything, it will contribute to the financial system. We also discuss Bitcoin specifically and whether it accomplishes what Satoshi had hoped it would.

In this episode we discuss the economics of Bitcoin and DeFi with Igor Makarov, an associate professor of finance at London School of Economics focused on capital markets, information economics, limits of arbitrage, and cryptocurrencies. We cover the economics of the existing financial system and how they compare to a decentralized system, a deep dive into the economics of Bitcoin including mining concentration, ownership concentration, and how bitcoin is used by market participants.

In our first episode of this series we speak to Daniel Mescheder. Daniel is a software development engineer at Amazon. He wrote a blog post detailing the specific problem that blockchains actually solve and in what cases that it useful. We discussed the basics of distributed systems, Nakamoto consensus, Bitcoin mining, and lots more.