Andreas Antonopoulos on the two futures of digital money: “The problem is we are going to a digital currency society where cash will be gradually eradicated either through non-use or a lot of countries and a lot of governments actively banning it. They’re putting limits on how much you can use cash, say, $1,000. And if it’s more than $1,000, using cash is illegal. We have to really think about the implications. Do we want a society in which our digital money is under complete surveillance and complete control, where if you go to the wrong protest or if you support the wrong political campaign, or if you make a payment to the wrong person or receive money from the wrong person, suddenly your money disappears, it’s no longer yours anymore, it’s frozen, it’s seized, it’s gone. And someone has control of that. Corporations. Banks. Governments. And in most cases there is no difference between corporation, bank and government. And so that’s one scenario, and the other scenario is one in which individuals control their money. And it is digital money, but it’s digital cash, like Bitcoin, where you can pay an individual from one person to another, just like I can with cash today without any other party getting involved. What really strikes me as amazing is that we’ve gotten used to this idea so quickly, which is that we no longer pay people. We no longer pay people directly. The less we use cash, the more we pay people through a corporation. So from tipping your valet to tipping your taxi driver to tipping wherever, tipping is pretty much the last remaining part of our society where cash is used to pay from one person who is not an incorporated entity to another person who is not an incorporated entity. Everything else you have to pay through a corporation, whether it’s a bank, whether it’s Venmo, whether it’s PayPal, whether it’s any of those things. And we’ve gradually gotten used to this environment where we can’t pay another person unless there’s a corporation involved. And that’s astonishing to me. And as cash disappears, that then becomes a final fact that every single payment in your life will be from you to a corporation. So the issue is not what we have today versus the digital currency of the future or Bitcoin or whatever. It’s that both futures are digital currency and in both futures, cash will no longer exist. That is inevitable. We are going down that road and now we have to choose: Do we go to the digital cashless society of corporate control over money with the complete and total merging of corporate and state money where instead of having separation of state and money, you have the merging of state and money and corporation and money where your money is branded money. You have Chase dollars. You have Goldman Sachs dollars. You have Coca Cola dollars. You have money that is controlled by a corporation. Or do we go down the other future where we have money that is basically an Internet protocol that is completely global that any person can pay any person they meet in the streets without any corporations getting involved. Just from me to you, digital cash. And it’s a less optimistic view because I’m fully aware of what the other future is and it’s already playing out and it is in my opinion, a very dangerous future.”