Is Gold Really Worth Something?

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Money is based on an absurd level of trust between people who've never met each other, right? Walk into a store hand a piece of plastic and walk out with stuff, exactly. It's kind of amazing when you think about it, right? You know, that i can interact with someone i've never met before, might not even like, might not trust at all,. And yet we can have a transaction. That would normally require a relationship, um, maybe weapons or something to back it up. We can have a transactions because of things like money.

For something of such obvious importance, money is kind of mysterious. It can, as Homer Simpson once memorably noted, be exchanged for goods and services. But who decides exactly how many goods/services a given unit of money can buy? And what maintains the social contract that we all agree to go along with it? Technology is changing what money is and how we use it, and Neha Narula is a leader in thinking about where money is going. One much-hyped aspect is the advent of blockchain technology, which has led to cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin. We talk about what the blockchain really is, how it enables new kinds of currency, and from a wider perspective whether it can help restore a more individualistic, decentralized Web. Neha Narula is the Director of the Digital Currency Initiative at MIT. She obtained her Ph.D. in computer science from MIT, and worked at Google and Digg before joining the faculty there. She is an expert on scalable databases, secure software, cryptocurrencies, and online privacy. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.