Why A Wall Street Journal Currency Reporter Didn’t Understand Money Until He Learned About Bitcoin

These are the show notes for the Unchained podcast. Listen to Laura’s whole interview with Michael Casey here.
In 2013, Michael Casey had been a currency reporter at the Wall Street Journal for years when he first heard about Bitcoin. ‘I just went, What?! What are you talking about? This is crazy!’ he recalls.
Having spent so much time covering currencies, he thought, as he looked at the soaring price, ‘That’s a tulip bubble. These are crazy people. They’ve got no sense. There’s no value to this thing. Why else would you want it? How could you possibly have a currency backed by computers doing this strange mining thing?’
After a dinner with executives of cryptocurrency startups and investors in the space, Casey began to really understand the technology behind it and realized ‘digital currency represented something far more profound than the digitization of money’ – that it was a way to reconstruct trust. And despite having been a business reporter for a couple decades, he even had an epiphany about what money truly is. From that point, he wanted to only write about cryptocurrency and even co-authored a book on it, ‘The Age of Cryptocurrency,’ with Wall Street Journal reporter Paul Vigna.
Casey, now a senior advisor at the Digital Currency Initiative atMIT Media Lab, reveals what realization he had about money and its true nature in the latest episode of my blockchain podcastUnchained (Google Play, iTunes, Stitcher, TuneIn Radio).

This post was published at Forbes on SEP 20, 2016 @.