Design Talk (dot IE) 0259 - Making New Money with Quinn DuPont
Welcome to the CITO Podcast.
This episode is a seminar by Quinn DuPont titled “Making New Money: How autonomous communities produce and govern cryptocurrencies.”
Paul Dylan-Ennis opens the session with a brief introduction after which Quinn presents an overview of his project, and Donncha Kavanagh makes some observations and invites reactions.
Decentralized cryptocurrencies are upending the foundations of economic power, challenging centuries of state and bank control over money. This research critically examines the rise of digital wildcat banking and its profound implications for economic sovereignty. Leveraging digital forensics, data science, and OSINT, this work reveals who actually produces and governs cryptocurrencies—and how their collective labor reshapes value and risk. It explores the forces behind decentralized money, the vulnerabilities these systems introduce, and the future role of state-issued currencies in an era of rapid monetary transformation.
Reflecting on the project Quinn notes:
"I've been working on this for well over a year now, and while it is still in development, the basic outline is complete. I make some pretty provocative claims, like arguing that global forces first emerging in the 1970s lead us inexorably to this point where the labour required to produce and govern new money has become involuted[1]. It’s a unique project that reveals how new money is made and details the implications for banks, nation states, and society. I also have some fun stories to share, like my effort to vampire attack Trump's WLFI token or my reverse engineering of the FBI's Operation Token Mirrors."
[1] Involution; the theory from Clifford Geertz where, in the original context, rice production becomes internally competitive and the processes require more labour without an increase in output - analogous to this story of technological development and precarious technological labour. I argue that the operational infrastructure of crypto expands to require more labour, despite no correlated increase in output. Thus, crypto overtakes national currencies not by meeting a market demand, but by accommodating excess labour supply.
Notes, extra questions, and further reading:
- Quinn’s homepage - https://iqdupont.com
- China’s “Involuted” Generation by Yi-Ling Lu | The New Yorker Published MAY 14
- The president and the billion-dollar crypto businesses – How the Trump companies made $1bn from crypto by Joe Miller and Alex Rogers in Washington, Paul Caruana Galizia, Nikou Asgari, Eade Hemingway, Oliver Hawkins and Chris Cook in London | FT.com Published OCT 16 2025
- "Overcapacity" or "involution"? How China's manufacturing suffers from over-competition Tracing the roots and perils by Elena Wang and Nina Chen | Baiguan.news Published APR 18 2024
Acknowledgements
Music
Title: CrazyMix
Artist: Sandbox Korg Ableton
Source: CrazyMix.aif
License: : CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
Cover Art
Title: Inspired by Wordpress Defaults
Artist: Allen Higgins
Source: CITO-podcast-STS.pptx
License: CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
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Design Talk (dot IE) CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
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