Periscope
14 NEWSWEEK.COM AUGUST 09, 2019
ECONOMICSBETTMANNARC+I^9 Eʔ*
ETTYMoney is now
programmable, like
software, and can
be designed according
to any criteria.BRETTON WOODS CREATED MONEY 2.
A small gathering in New Hampshire determined the fate of the post-war economic order.programmed to donate a tiny pro-
portion of each purchase to charity,
or to cleaning pollution. Imagine a
currency used by a growing network
of parents, allowing them to better
meet each other’s needs even when
traditional money is scarce.
These monetary experiments and
more are under way in the emerging
field of tokenization. And due to the
decentralized nature of these tech-nologies, they are very hard to stop.
We will likely soon see tokens for art-
ists, art, neighborhoods, non-profits,
startups, schools, teams and more,
creating new interoperable network
models and embedding localized
incentive structures into online and
offline communities across the globe.
This is Money 3.0—and it will for-
ever change the landscape of human
collaboration, just as Money 2.0 and
Money 1.0 did before it.
Economics, often believed to be
the science of money, is actually
about incentives. Money is the tool
we use to represent the value of our
diverse interests, and it’s a pretty
blunt instrument at that. We have
a hard time using it to account for
things like well-being and connection.
We don’t feel comfortable involving it
in matters of the heart, which also vie
for our attention.
A more complete economic frame-
work for why people do what they do
might take into account the crucial
work performed at home (which pre-
pares labor to enter the workforce
decades later); new evidence from
neuroscience that human capital is
affected by the quality of our environ-
ment; the ethics and costs of growing
inequality; metrics beyond GDP that
distinguish between healthy and
unhealthy growth; natural resource
limitations; the air and oceans that
we all share and rely on; and a host
of other elements that could make
for an economics that is rooted in
humanity—where it belongs.
After all, humans invented money.
We can now reinvent it so that it works
for us, and not the other way around.Ơ Galia Benartzi is the co-founder of
Bancor, a protocol enabling decentral-
ized liquidity between digital assets,
named in honor of Keynes’ 1944 mon-
etary proposal by the same name.the world’s population, and quickly
rising, currently lives. Perhaps cur-
rencies created by people you know,
or people you follow online.
Money is, after all, a belief system
between people. And thanks to in-
creasingly sophisticated digital net-
works, we can create, monitor and
upgrade the interactions and pat-
terns that connect us, more than ever
before. We can believe in people we
don’t know, and in money not backed
by countries, because we can believe
in the technologies that connect us
globally, like the Internet.
Money is now programmable,
like software, and can be designed
according to any criteria. Imagine
a currency that is programmed to
pay its taxes, bit by bit, with every
transaction. Imagine a currency