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WHY BITCOIN MATTERS FOR FREEDOM IN A DIGITAL AGE
https://archives.battleofideas.org.uk/2022/session/why-bitcoin-matters-for-freedom-in-a-digital-age/

Over the past decade, governments, economists and journalists have regularly presented Bitcoin as dangerous and risky. It’s for criminals, they argue, it’s a ponzi scheme – and it’s destroying the planet.

By contrast, supporters of Bitcoin have argued that the world financial system is a cruel labyrinth – creating a situation where tomorrow is traded for today, where capital is strip-mined without consideration for the future and where our money is devalued by central planners and our liberties eroded and behaviour managed in order to engineer compliance. Bitcoin, they argue, has the potential to help us escape this labyrinth.

In Bitcoin is Venice, Allen Farrington and Sacha Meyers explore the terrain of what they describe as a global, digital, sound, open-source, programmable currency. What might economies look like under a Bitcoin standard? What might this new form of capital do to our current governing bodies? Can Bitcoin bring about a new global Renaissance?

Join Allen Farrington in conversation with Jeremy Hildreth to assess why Bitcoin matters for freedom in a digital age. Do the risks of Bitcoin outweigh its opportunities? Or in adopting it, could we be embarking on a historical transformation on a par with the agricultural and industrial revolutions?

SPEAKERS
Allen Farrington
investor; co-author, Bitcoin Is Venice

CHAIR
Jeremy Hildreth
author, Unfuckwithable Money and Brand America; travel writer; commentator, Wall Street Journal, Spectator, Monocle, the New York Post and the Washington Times

Battle of Ideas 2022

Why Bitcoin matters for freedom in a digital age

This is a recording from the Battle of Ideas festival 2021: https://archives.battleofideas.org.uk/2021/session/history-wars/

How should we decide what works of literature, art and history form the ‘canon’ in our curricula, and which historical figures should we choose to adorn our establishment buildings? Are today’s students really too sensitive to live and learn alongside Britain’s past, to appreciate that today’s moral standards are different to those of our ancestors? And how big is the issue of calls for decolonisation? Is the idea that the school or university curriculum should rely on codified knowledge of the past simply a desire to maintain the status quo?

Speakers:
- Nicolas Kinloch
history teacher; teacher fellow, School of Oriental and African Studies; honorary fellow, Historical Association; author, In Defence of Teaching History

- Dr Sean Lang
senior lecturer in History, Anglia Ruskin University; author, First World War for Dummies; fellow, Historical Association

- Dr Alka Sehgal Cuthbert
head of education and co-ordinator, Don't Divide Us; author, What should schools teach? Disciplines, subjects and the pursuit of truth

- Sean Walsh
teacher; head of history

- CHAIR: Kevin Rooney
convenor, AoI Education Forum; politics teacher; co-author, The Blood Stained Poppy

History Wars

Battle of Ideas 2014

Our morals, their moralism?

Battle of Ideas 2015

Is there a future for liberalism?

Is technology limiting our humanity?

Hashtag feminism: radical or banal?

Growth is good: mission or mania?

From literature to Twitter: the death of the reader?

Can we manufacture a new economy?

Big Data, big danger?

Listen to recordings of our discussions and debates. Our aim is to expand the boundaries of public debate, to break out of today's echo chambers and challenge orthodoxies.

Why Bitcoin matters for freedom in a digital age

Academy of Ideas

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