Did you see any of the celebrity-backed ads for the slew of now defunct crytpo businesses? Did they leave you scratching your head at the time? It was precisely the inscrutability of cryptocurrency that allowed scammers like Sam Bankman-Fried to pocket billions through crypto exchanges like FTX. That company’s pitch was essentially “it’s OK if you don’t understand how all of this works, we’ll handle it for you.” But then, of course, the bubble burst. This week on Sea Change Radio, we check in with Matthew Slater, a community currency engineer and blockchain expert with whom we spoke back in 2011, at the dawn of the alternative currency movement. Slater boils down the past decade of cryptocurrency mayhem into layman’s terms and explains why, despite the many bumps along the way, he still believes in a financial system based on what he terms “trade justice.”

Narrator | 00:02 - This is Sea Change Radio covering the shift to sustainability. I'm Alex Wise.

Matthew Slater (MS) | 00:21 - If we don't need banks, because we can do finance ourselves. If we can organize, if we can trust each other. And also if we can trade more with each other, then we can start to build a financial power and take financial responsibility in a way that the government is never going to do for us.

Narrator | 00:45 - Did you see any of the celebrity-backed ads for the slew of now defunct crytpo businesses? Did they leave you scratching your head at the time? It was precisely the inscrutability of cryptocurrency that allowed scammers like Sam Bankman-Fried to pocket billions through crypto exchanges like FTX. That company’s pitch was essentially “it’s OK if you don’t understand how all of this works, we’ll handle it for you.” But then, of course, the bubble burst. This week on Sea Change Radio, we check in with Matthew Slater, a community currency engineer and blockchain expert with whom we spoke back in 2011, at the dawn of the alternative currency movement. Slater boils down the past decade of cryptocurrency mayhem into layman’s terms and explains why, despite the many bumps along the way, he still believes in a financial system based on what he terms “trade justice.”

Alex Wise (AW) | 01:55 - I am joined now on Sea Change Radio by Matthew Slater. He is a community currency engineer. Matthew, welcome back to Sea Change Radio.

Matthew Slater (MS) | 02:08 - It's a great honor to be invited back.

Alex Wise (AW) | 02:10 - Well, for our listeners, we had a discussion about cryptocurrency and alternative currencies back in 2011, and folks can go to Sea Change Radio dot com and go to the archives there to listen to that. And with, with all that's happened over the last decade plus, I thought it would be a really good opportunity to circle back with you and get your thoughts. As somebody who is an early thinker and engineer of alternative currencies, why don't you, first let's create a glossary for folks who, who may not be well versed in some of these terms like blockchain and cryptocurrency and, and some other terms. Why don't we explain in simple terms the differences between these phrases and words?

Matthew Slater (MS) | 02:54 - Well, starting with blockchain and moving on to cryptocurrency, let's say a blockchain is a new technology invented in 2009 that enables people to keep a database when none of those people is actually responsible for the database. None of them or all of them. And that means that the database is basically impossible to hack. And the first use of that new kind of database was to make a currency where the account balances and the transaction records were not kept inside a bank or a central bank. The idea was that we can now do payments without needing to trust these much-hated institutions in our society. So it was a big thing for libertarianism, for example, we are now free from the government, uh, in that very narrow sense

AW | 03:53 – Cryptocurrency - how would you define that?

MS | 03:56 - Well,