Introduction Samantha Yap [0:02]: Welcome to season 3 of The Story of Money by YAP Cast where we explore the past, present, and future of money. I’m Samantha Yap. Intro CTA - Spotify Follow The Story of Money by YAP Cast to learn more about where money is heading. Intro CTA - YouTube Subscribe to The Story of Money by YAP Cast to learn more about where money is heading. Voiceover: In this first episode we’re going to explore how the emergence of cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum has created new cultures, and how they are re-shaping the way we think about money. Most of the time we see money as a practical tool, a means of exchange. We don’t often think about Money and culture together. But money is actually a cultural phenomenon that shapes our societies, values, and beliefs. Our relationship to money and what we do with it is a way to express our beliefs and what we deem is important - or worthwhile. Our first guest is Paul-Dylan Ennis, a Lecturer and Assistant Professor in Management Information Systems at University College Dublin (UCD) in Ireland. His research focuses include the creativity of crypto cultures and the impact of technology on society. He has been teaching on cryptocurrencies since 2016. What I find most fascinating about Paul’s insights is the way he looks at how crypto is influencing cultures. Our guest for today - Dr. Paul Dylan-Ennis Samantha Yap  01:20 Hi, Paul. Well, welcome to YAP Cast. Very happy to have you on the show today. Dr. Paul Dylan-Ennis  01:23 Yes, very happy to be here. The Intersection of Culture and Technology in Crypto. Samantha Yap  01:26 I'm intrigued by your focus on cultures, subcultures, and especially crypto cultures. Why has this been a focus of yours? Dr. Paul Dylan-Ennis  01:35 I think this is probably just a fortunate accident. I've always researched cultures for-- I was always a researcher of subcultures and cultures, and trying to approach maybe aspects of finance, business or technology that aren't easily explainable by their purely, say technological part, or their purely financial parts. So you look at the internet, of course, you could explain the internet as something like a technology. You could also explain it as a place where there's lots of markets. But the most interesting element of I think, is the way it facilitates cultures and unites people who traditionally wouldn't have been able to connect for to form these new quirky culture, sometimes. Sometimes dangerous cultures even. I just always been drawn to the way that technology facilitates culture and the way that the cultures inform the technologies too and so when I arrived into the world of crypto, what I did notice is that, at least from an academic perspective, so most of the articles, most of the ways that people tried to teach crypto was in a purely technical way or a purely financial way and it seemed to me very different than say, normal, authentic, everyday crypto users. Most people who are say, they're a member of a DAO, they're not necessarily immersed in how the consensus mechanisms work or anything like that or they may not even have any kind of idea of what goes on under the hood of say Ethereum or Bitcoin. I just found that there was a real lack of a focus of trying to understand these cultures. I tried to understand the technical, let's say decisions as well based on the culture so you can explain say that like Bitcoin and Ethereum, say the consensus mechanisms, if you look at it in a very dry technical way, you can say, well, Bitcoin is into the mining and Ethereum is into staking. And then if you're a critic of Bitcoin and says, Bitcoin really needs to draw mining because of course, it's terrible for the environment and so they should just move to staking Ethereum and if you look at it as a purely technical decision, it's baffling. It's like, why wouldn't the Bitcoiners just simply transition over? So I often encounter this, this feeling. But then if you understand money, the idea of a digital gold that's difficult to mine is intrinsic to how Bitcoiners see themselves that its part of their self-identity, then it becomes possible to understand why they won't make that transition so it's a cultural, rather than simple, simply a technical explanation. Samantha Yap  03:50 You make a really good point there, if people intrinsically believe that Bitcoin or Ethereum is money to them. This series, The Story of money by YAP Cast, we like to touch on the historical aspect about money and to see where it's evolving with crypto and decentralized finance and, we see this evolving right now but if we're going to take a step back before, crypto kind of came into the picture. Reimagination of money, reflecting distrust in institutional management. With money today, how can you see money be culture? Because I'm just trying to think about it in the world today. I mean, the US dollar is the most dominant currency in the world but do we necessarily see the US dollar or the British pound have a culture? I guess it does unite like a country together. It's like, Ok, we're the UK, we use the Pound but yes, do you see it like that today with fiat? Dr. Paul Dylan-Ennis  04:40 Oh, almost like the US dollar is Ether and then the USA is Ethereum - so the blockchain and its currency. I mean, with many cultures, I'm definitely fascinated by this. I think I tried to make this distinction between pre crypto and post crypto. PC is this sort of new era when it comes to money because traditionally, people have always been interested in money, of course. It's one of those, it’s a strange topic. We've definitely noticed this from a teaching perspective, in the sense that, everybody is sort of obsessed with money in some kind of way. You need money to live, you're always chasing money, you define people by their money, so are they generous? Are they uninterested in money? Which is itself a relationship to money as well. And then, you know, it’s just sort of this constant subject that's present and everything you do, you're planning a trip to the shop, its money again. So, it's everywhere and I think, historically, it was definitely, always a practical concern but it's not really been a topic that people very consciously reflected on. The question of what is money pre crypto, I think, was a little bit repressed. People didn't talk about it too much. If you're an academic and you go to any university library, you will, you can go to the economic section, you might imagine that there's a huge money section but that isn't the case, you can do this in any university library, you'll find big sections on inflation, productivity, manufacturing, etc. But the money itself, the actual money section is very very small, up until around 2008 and so even the people who you would expect to be focused on it aren't really focused on it. This is the problem of the conventional theory of money which we all know. Early version of a meme, we have barter and then we've moved from barter to some kind of metallic form of money and then, over time, we mature into the system that we have now. So, there's like an evolutionary story of money that wasn't really contested and so I think that was a culture, that's a good example of a culture being very confident in itself. So the US dollar and the British pounds being and the Euro, being this form of currency that represented a power of strength in institutions, essentially. But then once you hit 2008, you begin to see loads more books appearing. So, all the all the books that since the intersection are suddenly everywhere because you have this loss of trust in the institutional management of money. It's the beginning of this story of mistrust in how countries are managed and it's manifesting, particularly with money so there's a Wizard of Oz moment, maybe. People all of a sudden realize that it's, there is a man behind the machine and this man is flawed and he may not know everything that he's been claiming up until that point. We have this idea of, that people were supposed to know what money is and then it revealed actually, nobody really does and then this seems to encourage, I think this is where it gets into the post crypto era and where you see the kind of counter cultures because effectively that's what they are, they're kind of revolts against the dominant or failing culture of say the US dollar or what Lana Swartz calls Bitcoin she says, she's an academic and says “Bitcoin is a theory of society about the collapse of the fiat system”. So, it's that’s sort of their beginning myth and then the transition of Bitcoinalisation. But then yes, I think what happens then is because the there's a gap, there's a missing part where we used to have knowledge people began to try fill it in. So, they begin to fill it in with things like Bitcoin and then we see, which isn't necessarily a good thing, financialization of everything. So there's all these different mini cultures that begin to emerge, like informal money counter cultures, hustle culture, retail investors, meme stocks, Wall Street Bets, FinToks, which is I get this from my students, TikTok for advice my students up like showing me the videos from that there as well and then like the Bored Ape Yacht Club, I always think is a good example of a sort of money counterculture where it's both, in one way quite silly. Like they're-- It's-- This-- We have an image of an ape and it's a game and another way, it's quite serious, because they're trying to make generational wealth true to the project itself. Yes, so I see all of this as a switch toward money being moved from its institutional bedrock of something like that you could trust to then an influx of countercultural narratives or populist forms of money that are trying to fill the gap but are in a very, because it's quite new in a very nascent phase so they're not nearly as powerful as say, the established ones but yes, it's all part of this feeling, I guess that things are kind of collapsing infrastructurally, you have to make it very very quickly so that's how I see the dominant culture fading and then the attempts to fill in with counterculture. Samantha Yap  09:19 Wow. Thanks for laying that out so clearly and eloquently and actually, it kind of verifies what I've been thinking because I was only introduced to crypto in 2017. Not as early as you but you're right, actually. Before crypto or yes, pre crypto, as you said, PC. Yes, people kind of had this maybe common trust in view of money but even when I got introduced to Bitcoin and Ethereum, I started to question what money was, like what money really is and I started looking into this and that kind of led me to even start this podcast which questions it because at the end of the day, everyone's like, it's all about trust but it's all made up and it's fiction at the end of the day and we're actually speaking at a time where post SVB fall, the Silicon Valley Bank fall. Money's evolution and the rise of alternative finance. Even in the last two years with the rise of decentralized finance, that has also emerged to be a counter alternative to traditional finance but then crypto or CeFi collapses and then, but then, Bank Run happens so, yes, all of this is kind of coming into attention. Yes, I guess so you're basically saying that all of this is, has evolved to counter what money really is. Dr. Paul Dylan-Ennis  10:30 Yes, I'm quite interested in history in general and I guess one thing I would say is, there is a tendency in cultures to basically imagine that you're living through the worst collapse, you're the first people to ever experienced some kind of like crazy institutional collapse. But of course, these are basically cyclical but it does feel if you're looking at history, that we're definitely at the end point of some kind of, let's say, dominant system, which has been doing particularly well for maybe like close to 100 years, possibly even longer than that and I really, when I read most sort of historical moments of decline, it's usually when the money becomes harder to find. It's when things become stretched, the ability to fund those things which the society has come to expect, whether it's a like things around like healthcare, or just general services, infrastructure. A good example of this as we begin to see those train kind of derailments and so on. Like, this is a classic decline of empire moment where the money isn't there to kind of keep the system going the way it is. I do think money is like the ultimate proxy for realizing that things are shifting and then when things begin shifting, it is then a moment where possibilities become very apparent. Another way of thinking about crypto cultures is that it's people thinking, Ok, maybe in some really deep, evolutionary sense, they're looking around saying, if this thing is collapsing around me, then we need to kind of construct in the design space as quickly as possible alternatives. We're just going to keep creating these blockchains as many as possible until we find something that kind of could work as a, as an alternative. And yes, for all the critiques that crypto gets, if you go back to say, 2013-14, the idea that inflation would run, what ramping the idea that banks would begin to collapse like these were like prescient and true things that the crypto community was correct about, although probably not always the best and because the behaviour is so bad themselves that often the things that they get right gets overlooked. Exploring the Cultural Views of Blockchains: The Technical, Social, and Economic Aspects Samantha Yap  12:24 Well, let's talk about the emergence of crypto currencies and crypto cultures so I think you touched on it a bit like so, I tend to see, say the Bitcoin blockchain and Ethereum blockchain is kind of like different ecosystems which essentially are like different, maybe even nations forming and they each have their own tax systems. Bitcoin hasn't seen a transaction fee worked in and even Ethereum has its own, proof of stake mechanism and this gas fees that you have to pay to use it. That's two distinct ecosystems forming. Will we see a world where yes, there's multiple, as you said, everyone keeps building new blockchains, new ecosystems. Will we see multiple ecosystems rising or will there be a winner? Dr. Paul Dylan-Ennis  13:05 Yes, so this is a big focus of mine, say, from the classroom perspective, is that you, when you begin, say, introducing people, in fact, everyone kind of encounters this but it's just super apparent in the classroom, is when you begin teaching about cryptocurrencies, you have to start somewhere and of course, you start with the story of Bitcoin and so that tends to color how people see the rest of the area so they essentially think that the principles and the morals of Bitcoin basically carry over everywhere else and so actually, debugging people once they move on to Ethereum is actually a bit of a job because they still believe some of the assumptions from Bitcoin, are also true. I do try to really emphasize this idea that to think of, so by saying crypto culture is to really emphasize this idea that each blockchain essentially represents its own micro culture. Each blockchain embeds some kind of cultural view of the world, which I tend to think as usually three parts. I call this the Hash-Bash-Cash model of decentralized organizations. This is just to help people ground themselves with blockchains because there are amorphous, it's sometimes hard to wrap your head around them. I say they've usually got, you know, a technical part. They've usually got a social part. The technical part being hash, the social part being bash and then an economy some kind of micro economy attached to the cash part and so just to give it a sense of the culture has these three different elements. If you look at Ethereum, it's got its own blockchain with its own kind of consensus mechanism and then we have a social community built around Crypto, Twitter, and Discord and Eth Denver and all those different things and then you have the micro economy and this is really the part that I would definitely agree with you that each of them tends here to really differentiate themselves because it's the economic experimentation that really separates say Ethereum from Bitcoin when you get down to it. A Bitcoin is an economic experiment and it lays a template for, let's say, the economics that are broadly acceptable in the crypto community. Well, it says certain things so the biggest one, of course, being the 21 million, so by saying that they're introducing the idea of deflationary economics and scarcity is sound economics in a crypto community perspective which is very unusual that's like we accept that as normal – like your blockchain should have a scarce asset but pretty much everywhere in the world like otherwise we just like that's crazy idea. The other part of it is sort of algorithmic authority, which is the idea that the monetary system in Bitcoin is unchanging. Articles in the past, they've called this monetary minimalism, so they're kind of like minimalist that you like the ultimate faux pas in Bitcoin would be a proposal that changes the monetary policy in any kind of way. The 21 million is sacred in an economic sense. And then in Ethereum you have like a completely different mindset. Not only do you have like proof of stake as a mechanism but you also have monetary minarchism, I call this. So, minarchism is a form of libertarianism. This is a bit jargony but basically where everything in society is minimized except for like the absolute minimal interventions that you think are for the benefit of the community and so in the case of Ethereum, this tends to come in the economics so EIP 1559, so the idea of burning some of the transaction fees, which then will again leading to this idea that deflationary politics is actually the best way to go about it and that's completely different because to Bitcoiners, the idea that you would introduce an economic change midway through the blockchain is almost like a shocking kind of manoeuvre. So I do think that that's sort of an interesting difference. Then if you go to Cosmos, you go to Cosmos, they have their own version and you can even do the same thing with, I guess, slightly less serious answer but if you looked at Shiba Inu, I'm sure they have their own kind of specific monetary way of looking at it - probably modelled mostly around Bitcoin. Yes, I do and I think that this is probably a good thing so this is the designs-based approach that I quite like. If we're having a failing money system, we're failing fiat currency system and I am an advocate for any multi-currency approach with blockchains. So I think we should have as many of them running as possible, mostly because it doesn't really cost any of the other people anything to have say, this is what I don't get about maximalism, I doesn't, I don't really get why you can't have Ethereum, you can't have ATOM, and you can't have Shiba Inu. They don't take from each other in any strong sense or any meaningful sense that I can really identify. I also disagree with the idea that, with all due respect to say, the Bitcoin community I don't really like the idea that we would just sort of put all our backing behind the single currency seems itself an extremely unproven thesis. Even in the currency system we have now where the dollar is hegemonic, it's not the case that it's the only currency. It’s the reserve currency, whereas there most Bitcoiners seem to be advocating for something closer like just Bitcoin and other currencies basically being pushed out because they can see that as basically a perfect money. So yes, so I think having multiple experiments running at the same time is probably better. The reason I like Ethereum's policy probably more is that it's closer to traditional economics, which is again, something in crypto which isn't normally supported but which I think is probably better, which is just the idea that Ether, the currency is just supposed to be a productive money. It's something that people put to work because of the, it's useful to starting a DAO, it's useful to starting NFT projects. It's a crypto fuel as Buterin calls in the white paper and I think that's probably the probably just like a healthier way to look at it that it's just the currency, the liquidity layer of like an economy but it's not itself the primary focus, whereas in Bitcoin maybe they're a little bit too focused on just having the money and let not enough focus on how it might be used to create new forms of organization. Samantha Yap  18:54 Thanks for sharing that. I like the way. So, it's very interesting because when I introduce an onboard people into crypto I also get them to start to, I get them to read the Bitcoin white paper first to get the basic understanding before I even introduced Ethereum. But I like that you point out that yes, there's a way to understand the different blockchains and different currencies with your Hash-Bash and Cash framework. So that's definitely interesting because but I do think now, with more entrance into the crypto world, people are entering via Ethereum or via other currencies now, not necessarily through Bitcoin, actually so yes, maybe that's just us being around for a bit longer than people in the space but it's worth thinking about. But why do you think it took the introduction of Bitcoin or Ethereum to also have this like sense of community and culture forming because now in the web3 world, as you said, we're using these words interchangeably but yes, every kind of blockchain has its own culture and community and everyone talks about the community and governance within a community. Blockchain: A Culture of Disenchantment and Community. What is it about the technology or the introduction of these Ethereum and Bitcoin that led to just a explosion of community vibes? Dr. Paul Dylan-Ennis  20:05 Yes. Here, I can almost be kind of like a little bit reductive with cultural answers because I think in some way, we're often looking for something much deeper than the reality. I think that with the original Bitcoin culture, the answer seems to be that you just have a group of people who are already interested in, say, Cypherpunk, like open-source development culture. They're already people who are just super into niche forms of technologies. So, they like to develop free open-source software as opposed to like working for companies, and they're sort of just primed toward this, or they're fringe libertarians. Libertarianism, we've come to accept as almost like another thing that's accepted as very normal in crypto land is libertarian politics, that isn't very common outside. I remember the first time that I heard about libertarianism as even a political position through crypto, I'd never heard of it before because it doesn't exist in Ireland in any kind of form and in Europe, I now know it does exist but it's still like a very obscure ideology or political philosophy. I think those people, they answer themselves, they're just kind of like fringe cultural people already, so they are primed for it. But after that, I do think it is more of a disenchantment situation that's happening. As that decade moves through, it really does feel like a decade of beginning with the 2008 financial crisis and then moving into this, there's a little bit of a generational shift, where people begin talking of Gen Z a little bit more and Millennials being looked at as this generation which is worse off than their parents, generational language begins to come in and I think part of this generational emphasis comes from the fact of people feeling that the future which was promised has basically disappeared and there's an acceptance of that there's a real acceptance that that's the reality of the situation, as opposed to maybe even five years before people still being a little bit under the illusion that history was progressing. But then it's now regressing in some strange way. And then you have, of course, the political situation from around 2016 onwards which is basically an accelerationism of chaotic political forces. The escape of means into memes and fringe ideas into like mainstream politics and disinformation and mistrust becoming normalized, this really means like the death knell of the institution. By the time it's around 2017, everybody is basically like assured that the institutional collapse is real and so on, and so I think that's why we begin to see from that period onward, people beginning to seek out other forms of community and other forms of organization. A little bit of it seems to tied with a growing isolation. So just the fact that people spend more time indoors and alone. So this would be another thing that I observed as a generation Z is that when I started teaching crypto, there was less familiarity in my classroom with like platforms like discord and Telegram, whereas now even if they're not into crypto, they're already sort of onboarded and using these so they're much more plugged into the idea of being a part of this disparate sub cultural communities, and crypto just happens to be one. I do think it's a disenchantment process and then looking for, and that's it, that's one part of it. Then the other, almost reductive answer is that once people discover the feeling of actually being able to control things in a very direct way. I think that's a very powerful feeling so if you're, suddenly join a Discord and then all of a sudden, you're deploying like multi-sigs with real Eth, or you're seeing how easy it is to make connections and how quickly you can form relationships. I think there's a very, something very attractive about how easy it is in crypto to do real things. Whereas in most communities that you might be involved with, if you're in a gaming community, you're all kind of like just passively waiting for the company to release the game and then you play the game. Whereas in crypto, like you're playing a game of some sort, you're an active participant in it and I think that that that's a huge attraction for a lot of people and then the other part of it, which I think goes under mentioned is entertainment factor, that a lot of people are just addicted to how exciting and fun crypto is, because it's a little bit absurd violence sometimes and then once you've got a taste of, let's say, like FTX, Celsius, and then even with the Silicon Valley Bank, kind of collapse, this isn't even crypto related but no, it's part of the drama so there's almost like, you need to keep up with the soap opera that's happening every week, with our characters like what's going to happen next with FTX, for example. Outro Voiceover: Samantha Yap [24:35]: I hope you enjoyed hearing from Paul-Dylan Ennis and his insights on the evolution of money through the lens of crypto. It's fascinating to see how something as ubiquitous as money can be so malleable, with the potential to represent not just financial value, but also our values as a society. In our next episode, we'll delve deeper into the concept of crypto cultures and their impact on money today. And we'll ask the big question: when will crypto cultures become mainstream and what will that look like? Outro Spotify Thanks for listening to this episode of YAP Cast. I’m Samantha Yap. Rate and follow this podcast to join us for another thought-provoking episode of The Story of Money by YAP Cast. Outro YouTube Thanks for listening to this episode of YAP Cast. I’m Samantha Yap. Share this episode and subscribe to this channel to join us for another thought-provoking episode of The Story of Money by YAP Cast.