New Lessons From the Island of Stone Bitcoins
Revisiting the story of Yap and Rai stone money yields surprising new insights about bitcoin today.
ABOUT
This episode is sponsored by Nexo.io and Wrejects.com.
In examining one of the earliest pre-bitcoin examples of a very bitcoin-like technology, "Speaking of Bitcoin" correspondent George Frankly learns some valuable lessons about where convenience, belief and control collide.
Credits
This episode was written by George Frankly with editorial assistance by Adam B. Levine and music by Jared Rubens and Gurty Beats. Album art for the episode uses an image by Einsamer Schütze licensed under CC BY 4.0, while the front page artwork is in the public domain.
HOST
Adam B. Levine joined CoinDesk in 2019 as the editor of its new audio and podcasts division. Previously, Adam founded the long-running Let's Talk Bitcoin! talk show with co-hosts Stephanie Murphy and Andreas M. Antonopoulos.
Finding early success with the show, Adam transformed the podcast's homepage into a full newsdesk and publishing platform, founding the LTB Network in January of 2014 to help broaden the conversation with new and different perspectives. In the Spring of that year, he would go on to launch the first and largest tokenized rewards program for creators and their audience. In what many have called an early influential version of "Steemit"; LTBCOIN, which was awarded to both content creators and members of the audience for participation was distributed until the LTBN was acquired by BTC, Inc. in January of 2017.
With the network launched and growing, in late 2014 Adam turned his attention to the practical challenges of administering the tokenized program and founded Tokenly, Inc. There, he led the development of early tokenized vending machines with Swapbot, tokenized identity solution Tokenpass, e-commerce with TokenMarkets.com and media with Token.fm. Adam owns some BTC, ETH and small positions in a number of other tokens.

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