SPEAKER_04 0:37

Hello, you're listening to the Philanthropisms Podcast. This is the podcast where we try to put philanthropy in context. I'm your host, as ever, Rod Davis, and this week we're taking a bit of a look at crypto philanthropy. So that is the jazzy name for the use of cryptocurrencies in philanthropy and sort of more broadly blockchain technology. I guess first I just want to say a bit about why I think I wanted to uh take a look at crypto philanthropy this week. Um I've been meaning to do something on it for a little while for a number of reasons. I guess um one is that there seemed over the last six months to a year to have been a kind of resurgence of interest in crypto philanthropy. Um and as somebody who's sort of been involved in this world for a little while, as I'll say a bit more about in a moment, I was finding I was getting asked more by journalists and and others to kind of comment or to speak at events about cryptocurrency and philanthropy, more so than I have for a few years. And I thought that resurgence of interest was kind of interesting in itself. I guess the the other things that then kind of got added into the mix was um there's been a bit of a backlash, I think, recently against crypto philanthropy, um, a few interesting individual stories. So uh most recently it was reported that the Wikimedia Foundation, um, which is obviously the sort of charitable foundation that it underpins Wikipedia, um, which was one of the earliest adopters of taking cryptocurrency donations back in about 2014, um, has now decided, after a vote by its members, it's got a very sort of democratic structure, to stop taking cryptocurrency donations, um, citing the the environmental cost and the quote general scamminess of the crypto market, which I thought was was fascinating, and I'll talk a bit more about that afterwards. Um, but there have been other stories as well. So there was a story about the World Wildlife, um uh World Wide Fund for Nature uh getting involved in crypto and launching its own NFTs, which again is something we'll talk about a bit on the podcast, uh, and coming in for criticism um from some of its supporters uh on that front, uh again around the kind of environmental concerns and particularly feeling that an organization that worked in conservation shouldn't be endorsing these these sorts of technologies. And then the the third element to add in, I guess, um, is that in the last week or two there's been a sort of huge uh drop in the crypto market, um particularly as I record this towards the end of last week. I think there have been previous drops in the crypto market, you know, big ones in sort of 2018, and that the market has has a tendency to be very volatile and to go up a lot and then to go back down again. But I think there was a sense that this crash might potentially be somewhat different in nature, and people starting to ask whether this was kind of the beginning of the end for the whole idea of cryptocurrency or its kind of long-term future. So I wanted to sort of take a bit of a snapshot look at what's going on in crypto philanthropy at the moment, what the current state of the market is, what we know, what we don't know, uh, and you know, some of the reasons that charities uh might want to get involved in taking cryptocurrency donations or some of the sort of wider applications of blockchain technology, uh, and some of the reasons that they won't, you know, potentially wouldn't want to get involved in that. Just to say a little bit about my own kind of personal perspective on this, um, as I said, I um slightly fell into this, but I uh kind of been involved in the world of crypto uh philanthropy and blockchain for nearly 10 years now. Um I first wrote uh a blog when I worked at Charities Aid Foundation in 2013, uh quite a naive one, sort of you know, wondering about this Bitcoin thing that I'd heard about and you know whether it was something that would be of relevance to charities. And then I kind of went on a on a journey of um delving a lot more deeply into the topic, writing quite a few um papers and reports, which you know, in their own limited way, I think have been slightly influential, or at least you know, kind of got people thinking. Um, and I've you know been spoken at plenty of events about uh crypto and blockchain and philanthropy, uh, some of which have been good, so it's given me cause to go and you know speak about the history of decentralized decentralization in charities up in the Rockefeller building in New York, uh, and some less good. So I've been in very hot, airless rooms uh somewhere in Kensington Olympia talking to a crowd of about 10 people who couldn't care less about blockchain and charity. And I think over that time, you know, my attitude towards the whole thing has sort of shifted and gone in waves. I think I I very much at one point kind of went through a journey of thinking, oh, this is kind of interesting because it's you know a new form of money, and then thinking, oh, actually it's more than that. There's something about the kind of underlying blockchain technology that's genuinely interesting and opens up all sorts of fascinating possibilities. And I think over time then what I started to see was that although I still maintain there is something interesting about the affordances of blockchain technology in terms of the things that it allows you to do or what it enables, the technology itself actually is maybe over-engineered or inefficient, and actually most of the projects that I've seen that have tried to put the stuff into practice haven't really paid off. Um, and there's a certain sense, and I know other people have said this, that that in you know blockchain is still a technology that's in search of a kind of killer use case, and maybe it's a solution in search of a problem, certainly when it comes to charities. I think I got a bit disillusioned uh from that point of view and and kind of slightly got out of the crypto world and stopped writing about it and thinking about it so much. And then latterly I kind of dipped back in again, partly as I say, because I've been asked by people to comment on various things, but also I'm kind of interested in thinking, you know, has anything moved forward, what's genuinely interesting about this technology, or at least kind of what it points to, or you know, is it something we should just sort of write off as a as a failed experiment? Um, I guess before we dive into to sort of taking stock of where the market's at at the moment, I think the other thing I wanted to just say is like I when thinking about what we actually mean by crypto philanthropy, I like to distinguish into a few different things because I think they're all they are kind of separate, although obviously linked. I guess one is the wealth that has been made through cryptocurrency and you know what relevance that has for philanthropy. And in a sense, this is kind of not even really about crypto, or in some sense it's not, because um it this might be people who've made money through cryptocurrency by running exchanges or by owning cryptocurrency and selling it, and they might be giving it in crypto, but they might not. Um, but it's just that the source of wealth itself is crypto, and there are some sort of big uh billionaire donors who are quite interesting, and we'll talk about in a moment. So I think that's one side of it, it's just the kind of people who've made money are therefore in a position to become philanthropists. Then the second bit is where people are actually deliberately using cryptocurrency itself to give directly to charities for for some reason other than that it just happens to be a form of money. Um, and this is where you start to see things where people are sort of making points about you know the uh the radical transparency that's possible by giving using cryptocurrency because you've got these sort of distributed ledgers that are open and potentially, you know, uh at least in theory, everyone can see all of the transactions on the blockchain. And also things like bypassing some of the traditional uh mechanisms of the financial systems, and people arguing that actually in some cases that allows you to get money to places where it would otherwise be very difficult to get money. Um and we've seen that, for instance, in uh war zones um such as Ukraine currently. There's been you know one of the big sort of uh elements of people giving to that. There's been a reasonable amount of people sort of giving cryptocurrencies either directly to um sort of small groups or grassroots organizations in Ukraine or even to individuals, and that's quite a sort of big trend, I think, with with direct crypto giving. Um we've also seen you know people talking about this similarly in in the the context of other humanitarian disasters and and sort of more general development. And then the third thing, I think, is kind of moving beyond even just that let's use you know the cryptocurrencies we have because they've got additional features, and thinking how can you use the the underlying blockchain technology in different ways to do different things. And some of this is still broadly to do with assets, and there are different kinds of crypto assets, and I guess this is where the non-fungible tokens or NFTs come into things, and I'll talk a bit about those later. But then you also have some of the experiments with using uh blockchain technology to enable different forms of governance or different organizational structures, and this is where you have things that um like uh distributed autonomous organizations or DAOs, um, which are a kind of way of using the blockchain technology and smart contracts, um, which are sort of automated contracts, to allow people to form organizations without a sort of traditional centralized um organizational structure or traditional hierarchies and have kind of flat horizontal organizations. Um, and I think there are some interesting questions about whether this is genuinely new or whether it's just something that you know we've always known how to do, um, but people are getting excited about and you know potentially sort of overestimating the the importance of. Right. So at this point, I should stop some of this introductory yak in and get on with the more substantive uh yak in that will make up the rest of the podcast. Um, so first of all, let's uh in a second just take a look at what the current state of the crypto philanthropy market looks like at the moment, who crypto donors are, you know, why people might want to give crypto, why charities might want to receive crypto. Um so stay tuned for that. Okay, so let's have a think uh first of all, just about what the the crypto philanthropy market sort of looks like at the moment. I guess in in terms of the the actual sort of size of the market, um it's difficult to get a handle on this really. I don't think there are any great figures that I've seen. Um I think you know some of the most compelling ones are the ones that give reason to feel as though this is still a phenomenon that's worth paying attention to, are around the the sort of the growth in the market and the scale of growth in the market and the the size of donations, the average size of donations. And certainly the the annual report put out by the giving block um towards the end of last year or the beginning of this year um was quite interesting. And now the giving block are the the platform I would say that have sort of cornered the market to some extent in terms of enabling crypto donations, um, and they put out uh a report in which they sort of tracked you know uh the increase in donations through their own platform and looking at the average sizes of that. And it was, you know, it was very eye-catching in that the the growth uh in terms of the amounts going through their platform was was enormous. And uh even more surprising, I think, was the average size of the donation. Um, you know, it was something like I think the average size of their donation was $10,000, um, which is obviously you know uh a mean donation, I'm sure that encompasses smaller donations and some much larger ones. Um but then you compare this to the average size of a sort of online donation made in traditional fiat currency, and that's more at the round sort of hundred dollar mark or something like that. So it's a it's a huge difference, which I guess is you know one answer to the question of why charities might want to get involved in this stuff if if the chances are you're able to tap into these much bigger donations because there's all this money sloshing around, then that's very appealing. But um, I mean I should say you know, probably we need to take those figures to some extent with a pinch of salt, not because they are you know necessarily in any way false, but obviously this is a snapshot from uh one particular platform, and obviously that it's you know essentially kind of marketing material rather than uh objective research. So, you know, we just just sort of take it on that basis, but it does suggest that there is something to this market. Um so I don't think you can dismiss crypto philanthropy out of hand as oh well it's not even you know a phenomenon, so there's no point in paying attention to it. I guess the interesting question to me is, you know, what do those crypto donors look like? Like what is this new potential donor class made up of? I think you know, a few years ago I would have said it was primarily kind of uh uh initial early adopters of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies from very much within the tech industry. And certainly when it came to any of the notable uh examples of kind of crypto philanthropy, that was very much it. So the one you know a few years back um that kind of caught a few headlines was the example of the Pineapple Fund. Um and this was uh a person called Pine. Um I I don't know who Pine actually is, um, but they were you know relatively well known, I think, within the Bitcoin community as a sort of very early adopter, and they're one of these uh what would be known as Bitcoin Wales, so somebody who kind of owned a pretty significant proportion of the overall stock of Bitcoin. And then they kind of set up a website announcing that actually they were going to give away what was at that point, I think $80 million of the money that they'd made um through Bitcoin, um, which you know they did. They had a sort of you know open grant application process, which was oversubscribed within minutes, uh, and all of that money was was kind of assigned. Um, and that sort of remained the the main kind of anecdotal example of the potential of cryptocurrency for quite a while. I think what we've seen uh latterly is the emergence of a new breed of crypto-rich millionaire and billionaire, even, who are sort of interested in philanthropy. And this is people like, I mean, example, so probably the richest one or the best known one, or starting to be well known at the moment, is Sam Bankman Freed, who is um he founded uh FTX, which is an exchange, and he's made sort of billions uh of dollars out of cryptocurrency. Um and he is getting involved in philanthropy in a relatively big way. And he's particularly interesting because he's very tied into the effective altruism community. But there's also people like uh Chiang Peng Zhao, who is uh the founder of Binance, and there's also Brian Armstrong, um, the CEO of Coinbase, uh, and even people like Vitalik Buterin, who is the um uh founder of Ethereum, which is the other sort of main cryptocurrency, I guess, although I'm always uncomfortable calling Ethereum a currency. But these these are people, I guess, who represent that model of you know they might well be giving in crypto, but more importantly, they've made a lot of money out of crypto. Um, particularly, I guess, you know, the the real money to be made, I think, is by operating the exchanges or the platforms that enable other people to give crypto rather than necessarily just you know investing or holding it yourself. And so, you know, these people are crypto philanthropists in the sense that that's where their wealth comes from, and maybe they do represent something interesting about you know a different kind of donor, different attitudes towards philanthropy, different views of the world. Um, whether they all have a kind of coherent or homogenous ideology, I'd think is difficult to say, but taken individually, there's something quite interesting about them, um, you know, as a group. I guess an interesting question is whether we will start to see more kind of average people, or at least people who are wealthy but not ridiculously wealthy, also giving uh cryptocurrency. And and this is far harder to say. I mean, I my gut feeling is there are those people out there because otherwise, you know, this money that's going through these platforms um or even into things like donor advised funds in the US wouldn't necessarily be there. And I think one of the interesting things here is actually when you look at figures for crypto adoption and crypto usage, there's a very high uh prevalence of it among younger people. And one of the more interesting points that I've sort of seen made about this is actually for a younger generation who have s have found themselves on the wrong side of a lack of opportunities to get on the property ladder. They've been, you know, since they uh came uh became adults, kind of subject to historically low interest rates, actually, there aren't many opportunities to kind of invest your money anywhere that makes sense. And so actually, the even though it's a risky investment, it probably makes some sort of economic uh sense to to invest at least a part of your money in these things that might have the potential to pay off hugely in the future. So actually, as a kind of long-term high-risk investment, holding some crypto makes some sense. Now, whether that makes these people likely to give any of that away, I don't know. And this comes to a kind of wider question we'll come on to later, about you know, what are people actually doing with these cryptocurrencies if they're not necessarily using them as money, which most people don't seem to be doing, and what does that mean in terms of their willingness to give them away? I guess the other couple of questions about you know who crypto donors are as a class is um I don't necessarily think they're kind of even homogenous amongst crypto. I think there are quite different um potential sort of you know worldviews and cultures associated with different cryptocurrencies. And certainly historically, when you look at the community that has developed around Ethereum and the one that's developed around Bitcoin, they're quite different in nature. And certainly Bitcoin, when it started, was you know very much kind of crypto-libertarian, um, tied in with a sort of uh a view of the world, it was all about bypassing traditional institutions and certainly central banking. Latterly, I guess, as it's become more mainstream, it's become more about people, you know, making large amounts of money and trying to convince other people uh to buy crypto as well, and it it's not an especially kind of pleasant part of the internet. Um, Ethereum, I guess, tends to historically have felt a bit more like people kind of buying into a collegiate community that's trying to build something and it's less about overt financial gain. And maybe that sort of represented or kind of explained some of the difference in in the two cultures. Um, but you know, the same is also true, I guess, for people uh getting involved in different uh other different cryptocurrencies as well. And then the interesting thing for philanthropy, I guess, is uh what does that mean in terms of the attitudes of these people towards charities? You know, what do crypto philanthropists look for and what are they likely to give to? And I think certainly historically it was always the case that a lot of crypto philanthropy uh understandably went towards organisations that were in some way kind of tied in to the digital world and to and uh were kind of tech savvy themselves and were sort of tied into things around kind of digital freedom and internet rights. And in part that's probably because those organizations were uh early adopters themselves and in a position to be able to enable crypto donations, but it also perhaps reflects the fact that those are the sorts of causes that crypto donors um are likely to be more interested in. Maybe they're likely to be less interested in giving to sort of traditional non-profits which are seen uh as you know just a part of that wider kind of establishment or centralized infrastructure, and more interested in giving to sort of smaller groups and kind of more radical organizations that tie in with their worldview. I think, you know, also, as I said before, there's an interesting question about the crossover between crypto potentially and effective altruism. Um I wouldn't want to overstate that because you know Sam Bankman-Fried is just one person, and I don't think there's necessarily a huge amount of evidence that the two um are inherently linked. But there are other signs, so Vitalik Buterin, the Ethereum founder, wrote um co-authored an interesting paper a few years ago about uh a different sort of approach to philanthropy called quadratic philanthropy, which is not effective altruism per se, but it's definitely tied into that sort of hyper rationalist worldview and applying that to some of the sort of traditional challenges around charity. So I think there is an obvious kind of link there.

SPEAKER_01 21:16

Genius, billionaire, playboy philanthropist, genius, billionaire, playboy philanthropist, genius, billionaire, playboy philanthropist, genius billionaire playboy.

SPEAKER_04 21:47

So I just want to come on now to have a think about why it is, you know, why it is that these people, assuming that we've identified who they are, might want to give cryptocurrency. So, what are the arguments for a donor, you know, per an individual who has some cryptocurrency? Wanting to give it. So I guess the first one is maybe just a pragmatic one, that people who've owned cryptocurrency, certainly for any length of time, may have bought it when it was very cheap because they were just sort of interested in it ideologically or in terms of the technology. And then it's gone up enormously in value when they found themselves sitting on these unexpected fortunes. And potentially there's, you know, they might be slightly kind of uneasy about it or even faintly embarrassed. And even if they're not, there's a sense that that money is kind of easy come, easy go, and that actually giving it away in philanthropy doesn't represent any enormous hardship on their part. I guess tied into that is that question um we were talking about before, which is, you know, if these things aren't actually much use as currencies, um, and the evidence suggests that they're not really, uh, I mean, not many people are using Bitcoin for sort of day-to-day transactions, um, which is partly because there aren't that many outlets that will take it yet, unless you're shopping for guns and drugs on the dark web. There are some that will take it, but I guess uh that that limitation, tied in with the fact that these things uh have a value that fluctuates wildly and may go up enormously, means that it's not actually that tempting to use Bitcoin to pay for your weekly shopping if you know next week you might turn around and find that it's worth 10 times as much. So actually, people are more likely to want to hold on to it as a sort of high-risk investment asset. But then, I guess from some people's point of view, if if that's all it is, if it's a high-risk investment asset and it goes up enormously in value, then maybe giving away a certain part of that increase is quite appealing. And that brings us on to another point. It's certainly appealing when there are tax advantages to doing that, and this is the very much the case in the US and to some extent in the UK, where at the very least, by giving away cryptocurrency directly, you're able to offset your liability for paying tax on that gain. So normally, if you're actually paying your taxes, and historically, uh crypto ownership hasn't always been that closely uh uh correlated with paying tax. But these days, I guess when the tax authorities are kind of more switched on to this stuff and they're trying to make sure people are paying tax on crypto gains, one way that people can legally and legitimately um avoid some of that is to give the money away to charity. Um so you know that's quite a strong sales pitch. Certainly in the US, I think I've seen more and more uh that is framing uh the appeal of crypto philanthropy for donors from that point of view. I guess there are some other sort of more practical or more interesting uh aspects to why you want to might want to give um cryptocurrency. And this brings us on to that idea of it's not just about the money, it's about the particular ass the particular attributes of this kind of money, which is essentially kind of programmable money in some sense. Um one is uh that you can potentially bypass traditional uh financial infrastructure, and that might allow you to get to places where for for various reasons it's otherwise difficult to transfer money or to get donations, either because there's kind of malgovernance or because it's in a war zone or a disaster zone and those traditional financial systems have collapsed to some extent. And this is the argument for you know people giving cryptocurrency directly uh to support people in Ukraine, for instance. So we've also seen similar happening in places like Venezuela. Now, the the difficulty with this, I guess, uh has always been, um, and this this argument, you know, about uh this sort of aspect of giving cryptocurrency has been part of the conversation for for years, and I've I've certainly heard it for the last you know ten years or so. The the point that was always raised, I think, traditionally was yes, that's fine, but there's there's potentially a huge last mile problem here because you can get the money you know to to another part of the system by giving it in cryptocurrency to somebody in Ukraine or Venezuela or or wherever, but if they can't actually then spend it usefully on anything in that country, it doesn't really do much good. It's just you know it's a number on on a blockchain saying that the money now belongs to somebody in Ukraine, but they can't really do anything with it. Now that might have become less of a problem as cryptocurrency usage has become normalized, and if people can actually spend it in that country as well, uh then maybe it does have genuine utility. And I think that in places like Ukraine and also to some extent Venezuela, where cryptocurrency ownership and usage was already quite well established, maybe it makes more sense um to you know for that for that argument to work. Um I guess another uh aspect of giving money in cryptocurrency that's often raised is around transparency. So the point here is that the um the blockchain is uh which essentially, I mean, I haven't done any technical uh explanations of what Bitcoin or blockchain are in this podcast. I kind of figured you either already know or you can go away and find that stuff out. But essentially, for anyone who is wondering, the blockchain is is the kind of the record book that underpins cryptocurrency, and it's a particular way of keeping records but without the need for a traditional third party, uh trusted third party to do that. So it's kind of the responsibility for maintaining this ledger is distributed across all of the people using the system, and all of the things that are put on that are, at least in theory, viewable by anyone using the system. So all kind of transactions can be can be viewed, and the units on it are non-fungible in some sense, so each unit of cryptocurrency has a kind of cryptographic signature attached to it. So when I transfer my Bitcoin to you, um this can be seen by anyone who cares to look at the system, and and actually that particular unit of currency or subunit of currency more likely, because having an entire Bitcoin would make me quite rich at this point, it can be tracked all the way back through the system to its point of first creation, and this creates the potential for a form of sort of radical transparency where you know 100% of all the transactions could be seen by anyone. And it's always been argued that this could potentially bring huge benefits because it allows you know to you to overcome issues with lack of trust in institutions or concerns about fraud or misgovernance, particularly in an international context. But I think there was always you know reason to be somewhat concerned about this, because I think you know, to my mind, there was always a question about whether a hundred percent transparency is necessarily a good thing. There are definitely contexts in which if you implemented one of these systems in a naive way it would be hugely problematic. And I always think here of examples like what if you were working on uh you know human rights issues in Russia or on um LGBTQ rights in somewhere like Uganda, um, where these things are illegal and likely to make people subject to uh government you know interference or oppression if you have transferred money to those individuals or groups in the form of cryptocurrency, they will potentially be identifiable by those repressive governments, and you might have, in trying to help, inadvertently made it easier for the government to do that. So you'd need to be very careful about that. Other reasons, I guess, why people might want to give cryptocurrencies, just a few more. Um, I mean, one is that people might have a desire to actively take advantage of the semi-anonymous nature of cryptocurrency if they want to give, but not in a way where they're identifiable. Now, lots of people will point out cryptocurrency is not actually technically anonymous, it's pseudonymous. So you can always see which wallet um money has come from. The difficulty is you might not be able to associate that wallet with an individual in the real world. Um, and as we'll see shortly, this actually can create some challenges for charities. But from the point of view of donors, there are, you know, historically have always been reasons, whether sort of cultural or religious or or social, why some donors might want to give in an entirely anonymous way, and this might potentially open up a new way for them to do that, and that might be appealing. And then the other two reasons that are sort of linked to some extent about why people might want to give money uh in the form of cryptocurrency. Um, I mean, one is the obvious one that um donors who have cryptocurrency and have made money in that or or kind of own crypto assets might want to give some of it to charity to benefit from the kind of halo effect or the good glow that comes from uh involvement with charities and sort of use some of that that reputational uh capital that charities have, um, not necessarily to launder their own reputations, but just to kind of as a bulwark against criticism of crypto and and the crypto market in general. So it might be, you know, some form of enlightened self-interest in doing that. But then I think it does also go the other way, um, which is that they might, you know, people who are involved in the crypto world generally have a sort of shared interest in making sure that crypto usage is as widespread as possible, um, because the you know, the the cryptocurrencies that they themselves have invested in only have value if people actually believe in them and use them. And one way, arguably, in which you can get more people to use crypto is to give it to organizations or groups or even individuals in the form of a donation, and you then have a sort of you might be helping them and genuinely driven by an altruistic desire to do that, but you also have a sort of you know enlightened self-interest in doing it in crypto because that then furthers crypto usage and legitimizes crypto usage. And you know, I think uh this is something that's definitely been raised as a concern about some of the work that's going on in kind of using crypto to give um and uh to uh parts sort of emerging economies in the world, and particularly some of the work that's going on uh in places like Africa. And I think there's concerns about the emergence of a form of kind of crypto colonialism where you know individuals and groups are kind of being forced to take these donations in the form of crypto because that serves the interests of the people giving the crypto rather than it being in the best interest of the recipients. And that that I think is certainly a concern. Okay, uh, we'll just take a short break there, uh, and when we come back, let's have a little think about why charities might want to accept crypto and also kind of what else you can do with blockchain that isn't necessarily straightforward crypto. So stay tuned for that.

SPEAKER_02 33:06

Yet today is not far distant when the man who dies leaving behind him millions of unhealable milk. We want leaves a million millions of millions of it.

SPEAKER_04 33:53

Okay, so we are back. And in this mini section, uh I just want to have a bit of a think about why it is that charities or NGOs might want to accept crypto, and then briefly about sort of what are some of the other things that you can arguably do with blockchain that people kind of talk about in this context. So, in terms of that question of why charities might want to accept crypto, I mean, one is this sort of straightforward argument around income diversification. You know, charities are always on the lookout for money because resources are scarce and lots of them are you know constantly finding themselves having to raise more uh resources through fundraising and kind of other ways of doing things and trading income and all that sort of thing. So the idea that there's potentially an entirely new form of money and an entirely new pool of donors that they could tap into is likely to be very appealing, um, particularly if those donors, you know, if any of what we've said about some of those donors being particularly interested in giving because they have these kind of assets that have risen enormously in value and they're you know likely to be uh easily convinced to part with them is true. I think there's also something interesting there about what's happened during the pandemic. Um, and I don't necessarily have any strong evidence to back this up, but there was so much discussion during the pandemic about the way in which um you know the restrictions and the lockdown measures in particular forced organizations to pivot very fast to digital and and sort of new ways of doing things and adapting to virtual working and online meetings and all this kind of thing. And from the point of view of fundraisers, many of them were forced to think of you know entirely new ways of doing things and having to learn how to use digital tools, as they found that you know, kind of uh charity shops had to be closed, um, kind of trading income from cafes and other things wasn't available anymore, and big in-person fundraising events weren't possible either. And I think you know, some of that was just about moving offline fundraising events into the on online world, and that worked temporarily, but maybe it's never going to be something that kind of keeps going longer term. But also, maybe some organizations started to think, well, what can we do that's actually kind of inherently digital with our fundraising and maybe think about keeping that going, you know, once all of the effects of the pandemic have stopped being felt. And I think that's probably where some organizations start to think again about you know cryptocurrency and wonder whether it's something that they could tap into, particularly I think at that point because the crypto market was pretty buoyant. So at the same time, organizations were looking around for new forms of digital fundraising and income and seeing that this market was was you know sort of on the up and up, which is not necessarily the case uh at the point at which we're recording this. Um, so I think that's probably a reason that people, you know, charities thought, well, maybe it's worth you know giving it a go at least. I guess the other thing is in terms of that uh idea of kind of tapping into a new pool of donors, you know, that it's potentially not just from a mercenary point of view, in terms of like, well, there's money to be had there, but maybe you you genuinely get into kind of new communities of supporters, um, and and that will kind of have benefits above and beyond the money. Um, and certainly um I was speaking at an event a couple of months ago, and one of the other people on the panel was from Edinburgh Dogs and Cats Home, who have become a kind of well-known example of an organization that's made quite a success of um of taking uh cryptocurrency donations. And and uh she was saying that actually one of the things they'd found was that the their donations initially had kind of come at them slightly by surprise, they'd sort of enabled cryptocurrency donations, but then had found that they received a relatively big donation from a group um called the poor theoryum community, which is people within the sort of Ethereum community who are interested in uh dogs and cats and and other pets. And they wanted they they were sort of forming almost a giving circle and they wanted to give some money, uh, and I think had found it difficult to find animal welfare organisations that were able to affect uh accept crypto, and they came across Edinburgh Dogs and Cats Home and voila, gave them some money. But then they'd sort of engage much more deeply beyond that. This was the start of a relationship rather than just a kind of one-off donation from nowhere. And subsequently, this community of sort of poor theorem donors, I think, had become quite involved in the work of the Dogs and Cats Home and had sort of drummed up more support and and done fundraising and and subsequently given some other kind of larger donations. So it's kind of interesting, I think, to see them tap into not just the money, but this kind of possible new community of of supporters. I guess the the other reason that at this point organizations might want to get involved in crypto having not done it before, is it's definitely become less complicated than it used to be. I mean, back when I'd started thinking about this stuff and writing about it, it it was pretty difficult uh to even sort of set up a cryptocurrency wallet. Um, and you know, actually at that point, in order to get crypto, it was difficult to turn fiat money into crypto. You had to be involved in mining yourself, and you know, it was all of a nightmare. It was quite off-putting. These days it's very easy to set up a cryptocurrency wallet, um, but but even more than that, there are platforms like you know, as I mentioned, the Giving Block and others that specifically exist to allow charities to take cryptocurrency donations and not even necessarily ever hold any cryptocurrency, so it can get turned into dollars or pounds automatically before they even uh receive it. So from the charity's point of view, they're essentially they're involved in crypto philanthropy to the extent that they're tapping into money that's made uh in the form of donations of cryptocurrency, but they themselves are barely ever even really touching that world. And and I guess the final reason that charities might want to get involved in this, and it's you know, I'm I'm wary of saying this as if it's necessarily a good thing, but it is, I think, you know, one of the realities, is that it's it's almost a form of kind of quite cheap PR, um, which is that if you experiment in a relatively controlled way with taking crypto and definitely don't base all of your financial plans on it, you know, you'll still probably stand out because there's not that many organizations doing it, and you might get some big donations, but even if you only get modest amounts of money, you're able to sort of say, look, we're doing this thing and we're experimenting, we're being a bit innovative. And you know, I think for a lot of organizations that is at least part of the calculation when they think about doing this stuff. And certainly, you know, one of the best known examples of uh of a charity, a well-known charity taking cryptocurrency for a long time was the the RNLI, the Royal National Lifeboat Institution here in the U UK. And it wasn't that they were doing it for PR reasons, but they they started taking cryptocurrency donations, Bitcoin particularly, back in about 2014. And it was only it was part of their innovation work, and they just sort of did it almost as an experiment, and they had somebody in the team who was kind of interested in in this stuff and and sufficiently savvy to be able to set up all of that, and you know, it was kind of done almost in a sandbox way, it's like let's test this thing out, see what happens with it. But they weren't claiming that this was you know part of their um uh part of their sort of strategy or anything like that at that point. So I guess you know organizations might think about it on that basis. Okay, I just want to come on now and have a little think about you know what else you can do with blockchain that isn't just about cryptocurrency in a straightforward sense. I think we've talked about money that or wealth that has come from the world of cryptocurrency, and we've talked about giving actual cryptocurrencies and what some of the arguments in favour of that are. But there are also many examples of people claiming other things that can be done with blockchain, and I've certainly written about some of these myself in the past. And so I guess the first one is that you can use blockchain potentially to create other types of assets that also have value in some sense, but aren't straightforward monetary assets or aren't claiming to be currencies. And the best known of these are as the sort of emergence of non-fungible tokens or NFTs, and so these are basically kind of unique digital objects, and this essentially kind of solves a traditional problem with creating objects in a digital world, which is that it was very difficult to maintain uniqueness and therefore scarcity value, because people could always uh kind of just replicate those objects and and uh kind of you know, um, they wouldn't keep their value because people can kind of create multiple copies and distribute them. And that's why people created things like digital rights management software for music and and all these sorts of things. So people have been trying to crack that nut for a long time. And NFTs use the the capabilities of the blockchain in an interesting way to allow people to create a cryptographic token, which is a sort of unique mathematical object essentially, and associate it with um with a sort of uh a digital object uh or an object in the real world, essentially, or uh potentially. And this is really sort of uh caught fire in the world of art, particularly because it's you know people creating artworks or associating artworks with NFTs and then sort of selling you know them for potentially kind of tens of millions of dollars. Uh and there's a lot of sort of skepticism about this and whether it's just all nonsense, whether these things have any inherent value, raises questions about what, if anything, is the inherent value of artistic works anyway. I think people saying, you know, maybe this is uh just a classic kind of economic bubble and and a huge period of hype. Um and I think some of that may well be true, uh, probably quite a lot of it is true. And I suspect we will see the NFT market die down. And in fact, figures recently show that the the sort of huge uh Inflated level of interest in NFTs do seem to have dropped off quite significantly. I think there is something interesting in the underlying idea of creating unique digital objects. So even if all the nonsense around NFTs kind of goes by the wayside, I think that bit will remain. Particularly if the the metaverse idea, so you know, the idea of kind of creating digital virtual worlds that we can inhabit and sort of use those as the next wave of uh of interacting and finding information on the internet takes off. Because in that context, having unique digital objects will be genuinely useful if we're all kind of uh inhabiting these digital worlds. So I suspect it is something that will evolve into something else, but but the kind of the core idea will remain there. From the point of view of charities, I guess some of them have been interested in NFTs. Again, probably partly because you know it's just interesting because you see these things selling for tens of millions of pounds, and you think, oh, hang on a minute, can we get a piece of that? So I guess there's the the kind of how can charities get hold of some of the money that's being made in the NFT market at the moment, whether or not it is a bubble. And certainly there have been quite a few instances of people selling NFTs and some part of the money or the proceeds and the profits being donated to charity. Again, I wonder if that's partly because people are sort of slightly ashamed about the whole nature of this uh bubble market and and sort of feel as though giving some of it to charity might legitimize it uh in some way or at least deflect some criticism. But then there's also, I guess, uh the other bit which is charity-specific or kind of charity-created NFTs, and whether charities themselves can kind of create NFTs that are linked to their work in some way and sell these as a new form of fundraising. Uh, and I guess there's a note of caution because this is certainly one of the stories that blew up in the last few months where uh the World Wide Fund for Nature, this is one of the things they were doing, as well as enabling cryptocurrency donations. They were proposing to create their own set of NFTs that were they were going to sell to raise money to fund their work. And these were going to be linked to um sort of uh endangered species around the world, and so there would be NFTs. The reason it got criticism, I guess it was two things. One is that um people were just genuinely quite skeptical about the involvement of a conservation organization in a technology about which there are major environmental concerns, about which more in a moment. And the second was that the NFTs themselves, the value of them was supposed to be related to the scarcity of the uh the animal or the species in question. And some people sort of pointed out that this had a the potential to create quite perverse incentive for people to make those animal species scarcer by killing them off. And eventually actually the WWF uh did a U-turn and said, you know what, you know, we were thinking about doing this, but you know, following all of the feedback from supporters, we're we're not going to. So they kind of got out of it. And then the the other thing that I wanted to um to just mention here, and there's a few others you could chuck in, but I think the most interesting one, because I'll come on to it in a moment, is the the other thing that you can do with blockchain around which there is still quite a bit of interest and noise, is using the technology um to create governance structures. Um, and this is where, if you've heard of distributed autonomous organizations or DAOs, this is where this comes in. So it's basically you know, you can take all the parts of an organizational structure, whether that's for a charity or a company, you know, kind of a set of rules governing interactions, you know, a list of members, um, and you know, a code of principles sort of determining how decisions are made. And you can encode all of that on a blockchain, and you can use these things called smart contracts, which are essentially kind of automated, self-executing computer programs that that kind of perform functions when certain criteria have been met, to make sure that all of the sort of the the mechanisms that that uh enable that group to operate are automated uh effectively, and you can kind of create an organizational structure. And the when people do that, I guess the the focus has very much been on not recreating sort of centralized, hierarchical, or organizational structures that are most commonplace in the commercial world or the charity world, but instead thinking about kind of decentralized, non-hierarchical or kind of horizontal modes of organizing. Um and there is something genuinely interesting in this, and it's something I have written a reasonable amount about myself. I will come on in a moment to why I think actually there's sort of maybe reason to be more skeptical than certainly I was in the past about this, and why actually there are more questions to be answered. But this is something that I think is sort of still genuinely interesting. Okay, uh, we'll just take a very short break now, and then in the final section, we want to come back and get on to the bad stuff. And for those of you who've been uh you know patiently waiting, this is the bit where we'll run through all of the problems uh with crypto philanthropy and blockchain. So stay tuned for that.

SPEAKER_01 49:17

Meeting of industrial leaders in Washington. Here's Julius Rosenwald. Most people are of the opinion. That the one the man has made a fortune. That is the opinion on any subject of the man.

SPEAKER_04 49:49

Okay, so uh we're back for the final section. Uh in this bit we just want to talk um a little bit about why it is that you know charities or non-profits might want to steer clear of crypto philanthropy altogether. And this is kind of based on lots of arguments that I have uh heard over the years or you know, things that I've kind of uh struggled with internally about you know some of my feelings about about this stuff. And it's not to say that I think necessarily that crypto philanthropy is is a terrible thing inherently, but I do think there are a number of reasons that people need to give quite a bit of thought to it before engaging, um, and you know, making sure that they're able to kind of answer these questions in their own mind, and you know, sort of outline some of that now. So I guess the first reason, probably the most pragmatic in some way about why you might want to steer clear, is the the volatility. So Bitcoin and Ethereum and all of these other cryptocurrencies are that they can go up a lot in value, but they've also gone down many times uh enormously in value, and they can do that very fast. So they're subject to huge fluctuations in in price. Now, from the point of view of a charity, this makes them, you know, I think a pretty difficult thing to justify within the sort of fiduciary responsibility of trustees or senior management. You know, if there's any uh suggestion that a charity should be taking and holding crypto as part of its you know main kind of portfolio of assets, I think that's very difficult to justify at this point in time. If you know there might be some special cases for organizations that are sort of tied into that world or where they are kind of you know foundations or something that are owned by an individual or or a group that are particularly tied into the crypto world, fine. And they think you know they understand what they're doing and they've got a plan. For most, you know, 99.9% of non-profits, I think, you know, the idea that they would be taking crypto and keeping hold of it in any form, it just just to me seems crazy, to be honest. So I think you know the argument then is if you do want to get into the crypto world, how do you do it? Well, either you use one of these platforms that's able to allow you to tap into crypto donations but turns that into fiat money before you even have to get hold of it. So you as a charity don't even need to have a crypto wallet, you just you know join sign up with one of these platforms and then people are able to donate to you in crypto and it gets turned into dollars or pounds. Or if you're a charity and you do have a crypto wallet or want to have one, you know, by all means do that if you feel you know sufficiently kind of uh uh savvy to know what you're doing and are aware of the risks. But I still think that you would want to turn that money into fiat currency as quickly as possible to avoid the volatility. Um the the other second reason, I guess, why you might want to steer clear of this is concerns about the fact that the anonymity or pseudonymity of cryptocurrencies makes it quite difficult to meet all the requirements around due diligence or kind of know your customer when it comes to uh donations coming in. Um I guess here like charities and non-profits, they always have a responsibility to know what the source of funds for the donations, for donations coming to them is because they have to make sure that they're not um being used for money laundering, it's not the proceeds of crime or terrorism. And you know, in order to do that, if they're getting large donations, they have to know who the donors are, and there's quite you know lots of sort of uh anti-money laundering checks and counter-terrorism financing and all this sort of thing. And the the problem uh potentially with crypto is that certainly if you just had a crypto wallet that was, you know, an openly published address and people were able to give you money in the form of crypto to that, there's no way of you knowing really, unless those donors choose to tell you who they are, where the money's coming from. So you might be getting money from all sorts of places and you don't know what the source of that money is. And this is certainly something that a few charities have ended up on the wrong side of. So uh there was a story last year, maybe, or maybe even the year before, um, where the Water Project and Children International ended up receiving money actually via a platform, but it turned out that this money, which had been given in the form of crypto and passed on to the charities, actually came from a hacker group who had stolen it um through a hacking attack, uh, and then subsequently kind of came out and claimed responsibility and said that it was supposed to be a kind of Robin Hood-esque thing. But this put the charities in a very difficult position because they now knew that that money was from the proceeds of crime, but it's sort of technically quite difficult to know what to do with it once you've got it and it's past the charitable threshold. I mean, there are, you know, people who are involved in the cryptocurrency and blockchain world will you know be pointing out that actually there are ways around this and there are certainly ways of finding out where money's come from, and you can do things like chain analysis and others. And actually, arguably, if done properly, um cryptocurrency is more traceable than fiat currency, certainly cash fiat currency. So it's not necessarily that it's it's kind of fundamentally more of a problem, it's just that in practical terms, um, regulators are still getting their heads around this thing, and charities and non-profits certainly are. So I think you know they they will have quite justifiable concerns about what that anonymity might mean for them and knowing the sources of their donations. The third reason why you might want to reject it, and this is one that I guess people listening to this will probably be aware of at this point, and I think has become a big reason that lots of organizations don't want to get involved in crypto, is around concerns about the environmental impact of the technology. So the the point here is that the the process that produces um particularly the Bitcoin blockchain, but other blockchains as well, um, relies on a thing called um proof of work as a consensus protocol. So this is without going into the detail, this is essentially the way that each new link in the blockchain is produced. Um and it's it's almost I kind of think of proof of work as being wasteful by design. It's kind of the security of it almost comes from the fact that in order to cheat, it would take so much effort and energy that it's it's not theoretically impossible, but it's in practice very unlikely. But the problem with this is it means that the the energy usage of uh these cryptocurrencies, particularly the mining processes, is absolutely vast. Um, and people have increasingly sort of raised concerns about this and whether it's ethically you know justifiable uh to kind of get involved in these uh in taking cryptocurrencies because you're then kind of complicit in this environmental impact. Now, I guess there's a couple of points to make on this. There's a sort of a whataboutism argument that does get made by some defenders of crypto, which is um, well yes, that's fine, but it's it's not about it's not it's not that crypto is bad and has a big energy use and everything else, you know, it all other technology is entirely environmentally neutral, because it really isn't. You know, what about the energy usage of data storage centres or you know, a platform like TikTok or something like that? They all use vast amounts of energy too, and that's absolutely true. Um, I guess the the particular concern about crypto might be a sort of a sense or a suspicion that the energy usage is that much more wasteful because there's not anything even really being created by through vast amounts of this this energy. Like a lot of it is is just being wasted on trying to kind of uh calculate um hash hash functions basically to create new blocks that never goes anywhere and and that this is sort of built into the model. Another sort of response from some people in the crypto world would be, well, what if all of the energy came from renewable sources? Would you be happy then? I mean, I guess in an environmental sense, yes, it probably would it probably would answer some of those, although essentially if you kind of believe that the the fundamental process is just wasteful in itself, uh even though uh renewable sources of energy are um uh you know on themselves don't have the environmental impact, you might still say, well, yeah, but why are we still using that renewable energy on this wasteful process that we don't think has any value? So it's not necessarily a uh you know a direct answer. I guess the final one is that actually there are other ways potentially of running blockchains, particularly there's a different model called a proof of stake protocol, and some other um cryptocurrencies or crypto assets already work on this basis. Um and Ethereum, which is the next biggest one after Bitcoin, is is at least in theory shifting from a proof of work consensus protocol to a proof of stake. And if it does, then that will cut the energy usage of uh Ethereum by about 99%. So maybe some of these uh concerns will be less relevant, but you know, uh again, this sort of remains to be seen. Bitcoin itself is never going to shift uh from away from proof of work, and it's still by far the biggest cryptocurrency. So I think the environmental concerns are still very valid. The other reason, I guess this, you know, this is uh going back to the Wikimedia Foundation story that we talked about a little bit earlier. You know, they cited environmental concerns. The other thing they cited was general scamminess. Um, and I really kind of this resonated with me because that's one of the things that I uh I found kind of most off-putting spending time in the world of crypto and crypto philanthropy. I think it's always been an element of it. There's always been sort of charlatanism and and probably sort of outright fraud as well. But the more that the world's got mainstream and the more that there are kind of unsuspecting uh members of the public and sort of potential you know investors who can be duped, uh, the worse it's got. And so, you know, I I've heard all kinds of bullshit and nonsense over the years. Um, you know, I'm because I was a bit prominent in in sort of talking about charities and philanthropy and cryptocurrency. A few years ago I used to get people coming to me all the time with the you know the the new charity coin that they'd created, and they have white paper or something, um, essentially just with a graph that you know with a diagonal line at 45 degrees, um, one bit saying sort of time and one saying income or value. Uh, and I was sort of thinking, I'm not sure that's a business case uh for what your coin is going to be worth anything. And all of them fell by the wayside because they were just I don't not some of them might have been outright fraudulent, but a lot of them I think were just very poorly thought through and people just didn't really have an actual kind of use case for why anybody would want to use these things. You know, you also see others where people make wild claims about you know having solved some problem or other by kind of fundamentally uh you know um addressing the underlying mathematics of it, and I always think I think it's unlikely that you sitting in your bedroom uh somewhere as a as a kind of 18-year-old have kind of solved this fundamental cryptographic problem. Not to say it's impossible, I mean that's essentially how Vitalik Buterin came up with the theorem, um, but I think in general it pays to be sceptical about this sort of thing. I guess linked to that as well, it's it's not even necessarily the sort of the scamminess or a concern that there's anything fraudulent about this stuff. I think there is just something off-putting potentially for a lot of charities when they when they think about this stuff about the culture and ideology of crypto. Um, I mean, particularly when talking about Bitcoin, you know, if you spend any time on sort of crypto, Twitter, or anything like that, it's very macho. Uh it's kind of it's deliberately insular, there's a lot of jargon and gobbledygook. Um, and you know, most of the time, I think having spent time sort of you know listening to this stuff, you know, and feeling like, oh, I don't really know what this person's talking about, I think I came to realise that they don't often know what they're talking about either. And there's a lot of sort of word salad that's designed specifically only to make it seem more complicated than it is, and to create a sense of people being on the outside and on the inside. Um, and there's a sort of Emperor's New Clothes element to that where if you kind of nod your head sagely and agree and start to use the same language yourself, then you're on the inside of the cult, and if you don't, then you're you know, you're uh left on the outside and you're a naysayer or a denier. I think sort of ideologically as well, there is still an element of crypto which is very much about kind of libertarianism and anti-authoritarianism to some extent, and I think for some organizations maybe that's that's appealing, at least in the sense of you know, kind of disintermediation or kind of doing away with traditional middlemen. But for a lot of organizations within civil society, I think most of them have an interest probably in promoting the idea that institutions do have a value in some sense and that we don't necessarily want to smash down all of the existing structures and systems within society. In particular, I think you know, blockchain and crypto kind of promotes the idea that we can do away with trust or we can solve trust as a problem by using technology that enables you not to have to trust anyone. But actually, from the point of view of civil society, surely we want to make people trust each other more and so kind of rebuilt trust where it's been damaged rather than find a workaround for it. So I think you know that's probably a kind of potentially uncomfortable fit. And then I guess the final reason why you might not want to get involved in crypto philanthropy at all is you might just not believe this stuff has any intrinsic worth. I mean, I think the short-term value of crypto is unarguable. There is definitely money in that system, um, and it's something that charities could tap into, but you might know enough about it to feel that long-term it doesn't have any inherent worth, and so actually you'd rather just not bother getting involved. And that scepticism might be about you know its role as a currency or as money. And I think there's still plenty of people who would say, well, you know, whatever these things are, they're not money because people they don't fulfil any of the sort of basic requirements of money in terms of being a means of exchange and a store of value and a means of uh kind of ascribing value to things. And actually, even just today as I record this, I think Sam Bankman uh Freed, a billionaire founder of FTX, came out and said about Bitcoin. It was like it long term it doesn't have any future as a form of money. So if these things aren't money, you know, what are they? Very high risk, very volatile investment assets, maybe, but you know, do you you know if you're a charity and you're wanting to get into this world, is that a thing that you want to get into? Or you might have skepticism, you know, not just about their use of as uh as currencies, but just about the kind of wider uses of blockchain and the claims made about that. Because, as yet, to be honest, having been in this world myself for nearly a decade, uh haven't yet seen the kind of compelling killer use cases. There's lots of ideas, and I've been you know guilty myself of coming up with many of them, but they're quite theoretical. And when people have put them into practice, they're either you know the technology hasn't lent itself to it, it hasn't been possible, it's been sort of over-engineered, or um, it's sort of worked just about, but never really gone beyond kind of minimum viable product or a testing stage. And very few of these, virtually none I can think of have sort of taken off in any meaningful way. And uh, you know, I think even where some of this stuff has worked, there's genuinely a sort of suspicion that actually did you even need the blockchain in the first place, or could you have just done this stuff with you know a less flashy technology? I think in a lot of cases that probably is true. And then finally, I think just in terms of not believing this stuff has an intrinsic worth, I'll just throw in that I think there is um you know, I mentioned before some particular skepticism around the the idea of DAOs and the kind of use of blockchain for decentralized governance. And I wrote a paper pretty much all about this, which um I gave at the R Nova conference in 2019, which I can put a link in the show notes to. But basically what I was looking at in that is The question of you know, do do the the affordances of these new technologies, particularly blockchain, in terms of what they enable you to do and the opportunities that they they present, do they kind of uh uh offer genuinely new ways of doing things uh in terms of decentralized governance? Or are we really are we simply going to rediscover old problems in new guises? So the technology definitely allows you to do things at a scale and a pace that wasn't possible before. And in doing that, I think people have suddenly thought, wow, we can do all of these you know things. We don't need traditional organizational structures anymore. We can just do everything in in the form of DAOs and it'll be amazing and it'll be non-hierarchical and horizontal and all the rest of it. And I've very much been caught up in some of that hype myself in the past. But I think there are known limitations of horizontal organizing or sort of historical challenges with it. Um and I think in here around you know the some of the points that Joe Freeman raises around the tyranny of structurelessness, um, the fact that you often get kind of hidden cliques, and that actually sometimes that's worse within uh non-hierarchical organizations than it is in hierarchical organizations. It makes it, you know, if you've got a leaderless organization, it makes it easier for outside uh forces to choose for themselves who the leaders of that organization are, as we see happen with um social movements and kind of government interactions sometimes. But often these structures are better at discussing ideas and talking than they are at coordinating around genuine action. So I think around all of those things there are still questions to be asked about whether whether you know whether the technology actually allows you to do this stuff in the first place. But even if it does, whether it uh overcomes any of those known problems or whether we're just we'd forgotten that those were the problems with doing things in this way and we're going to rediscover them in the future. So I think that kind of brings us uh to a close on that. I mean hopefully that's some food for thought for everybody. But I mean I guess you know, my my kind of short version of that is I still think there is something interesting about the ideas of decentralization and disintermediation uh and about kind of non-hierarchical forms of organizing, and also about things like um unique digital objects. So I think some of what the uh the of what cryptocurrency shows is possible and some of the affordances of blockchain technology are genuinely interesting and we should take them seriously. But I think there is still a long way to go to be convinced that uh that necessarily that you know this technology itself is going to be the thing that enables those affordances to be realised in a meaningful way. In the shorter term, uh cryptocurrency is clearly a thing at the moment, uh it does, you know, it does exist, it does have some value, and it's making you know, people are making real money in terms of fiat currency out of it. And so if you're an organisation that is wandering about dipping a toe in this water, as long as you kind of go into it with open eyes and put sufficient safeguards in place in terms of you know making sure you're not subject to the volatility and making sure that you are kind of confident that you know how to handle any of the issues around anonymity and that kind of thing, then you know, by all means go ahead. And there are organizations out there making um you know success of it. But whether it's genuinely something that will become part of the philanthropy landscape in a meaningful way longer term, I think the jury's still very much out on that. Okay, well, that brings us to a close. Um, I'll put links in the show notes to all of the things that we've been discussing today. Um, if you uh have ideas for things that we could talk about on the podcast or people I could interview, uh do drop us a line. You can find the email address on the website at www.philanthropisms.com, and you can also find all of the previous episodes of the podcast there as well. If you want to follow me on Twitter, find uh more of these kinds of musings and thoughts, you can do that at Rodri underscore h underscore Davis or at for literacy if you want stuff that's more about kind of history and that sort of thing. Other than that, just like, subscribe, tell all your friends about it, do pass on the good word to anyone you think might want to listen, and I'll see you next time.

SPEAKER_00 1:10:23

Bye.