Scott D. Mainwaring, Ph.D.

Affiliate faculty

Dept. of Human Centered Design & Engineering (HCDE)

College of Engineering, University of Washington

scottmainwaring@gmail.com

Money, trust, and inclusion

The social life of money

A clay tablet with cuneiform inscription from Anatolia circa

1875-1840 B.C. Money started with receipts and ledgers, not

barter.

archaeologynewsnetwork.blogspot.com/2017/11/cuneiform-

tablets-provide-clues-on.html

From kevinmd.com/blog/2014/12/dear-hmo-dont-want-

money.html

Let’s make our own money

One Fundred Dollars.

Hand drawn by the

artist J.S.G. Boggs

(1955-2017). See

Boggs: A Comedy of

Values by Lawrence

Weschler.

One and one-half hour

RiverHOURS notes (front

and back), complementary

currency produced by the

Gorge Local Currency

Cooperative (GLCC).

riverhoursalternate.weebly.

com

Digital money

First plastic magstipe credit card, 1969

Edy Felica cash card, launched 2001 Safaricom M-PESA mobile money

system, launched in Kenya 2007

Meiwaku and tokushita!

Comment on Yelp, 7/4/15: “To this genius holding

up the line while playing on his phone, I hope

your sub gives you explosive diarrhea. okinawa.stripes.com/news/jackpot-pachinko-can-get-you-

hooked-japan

Tokyo Metro at rush hour. Photo by Tim Adams (Wikimedia).

Money games

QQ, Tencent’s penguin

mascot, with Q Coins

A wang ba (网吧 - internet café) in China. Photo from

https://technode.com/2014/09/30/a-new-age-for-chinese-

internet-cafes/ More Monopoly money ($30 “billion”) is

printed each year than real money.

Photo: Jibril Sulaiman, USA Today

Blockchain dreams

Lana Swartz Asst. Prof. of Media Studies,

University of Virginia

Website: llaannaa.com

Lana Swartz. 2017. Blockchain dreams: Imagining techno-economic alternatives after Bitcoin. In Manual

Castells (ed.), Another Economy is Possible: Culture and Economy in a Time of Crisis. Wiley.

Radical dreams

• Futurity – “if we don’t dream the future

now, someone else will”

• Decentralization and disintermediation

• “the logical conclusion of the Internet”

• Doing away with trust in “middle men”

(governments, payment networks, …)

• The autonomous and the automated

• Doing away with humans

• Trust in “incorruptible” algorithms

The incorporative blockchain

• More boring, realizable dreams of the

banking and technology industries

• Efficiency; compliance (KYC/AML)

The Civil experiment

Jen Poyant and Manoush Zomorodi

“ZigZag is a podcast about changing

the course of capitalism, journalism,

and women’s lives. For real.”

Stable Genius Productions - one of the

“newsrooms” running on CIVIL

zigzagpod.com and civil.co

theverge.com/2018/10/17/17991296/civil-

failed-token-sale-blockchain-media-ethereum

One of the first consumer-facing ICOs

Needed to raise $8m; raised $1.4m

($375,000 from 3000 consumers)

The grey zone

Financial inclusion

• An unrealized (and unprofitable?)

dream

• Big usability issues – access isn’t

enough

• Real needs, though

• The unbanked and under-banked in

Oregon

• Funding for small businesses

• Lower card fees for merchants

Can the blockchain help?

If it can, it won’t be without

intermediaries

bankonoregon.org

More

10/12/18 Episode:

Full Faith & Credit

Featuring Neha Nerula (MIT)

and Bill Maurer (UC Irvine)

A nonprofit organization committed to

creating equal, open and inclusive

opportunities in the blockchain industry.

diversityinblockchain.com