All Publications
RESEARCH
The Satoshi Papers:
Reflections on Political Economy after Bitcoin
The first book of its kind: an open exchange of ideas among scholars about the relationship between money and state in a post-Bitcoin world. This compendium of ten original articles, written by leading researchers in monetary policy, economic theory, and the social sciences, takes new steps toward answering today’s most urgent political question: whether our legacy institutions still serve the goals of liberty and prosperity.
Edited by Texas Bitcoin Foundation director and Bitcoin Policy Institute fellow Natalie Smolenski, the project was inspired by the eighteenth-century American debate between the Federalists and Anti-Federalists.
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Just as those papers constituted a forum for debate, the articles in this volume exhibit differing points of view emerging from different analytical frameworks, and they come to different conclusions about what is already underway and what should be. Nevertheless, they share a set of animating principles: that respect for the freedom and privacy of the individual is the bedrock of a just and prosperous society; that power should be rigorously checked and limited; that human coordination happens first and foremost bottom up; and that technology is a critical engine for the progress of humanity.
Designing a Responsible Universal Learning and Employment Record Ecosystem
In today's rapidly transforming economy, finding qualified employees with necessary skills and credentials has become a major challenge for many organizations. The Covid-19 pandemic has only exacerbated the labor shortage problem, putting pressure on organizations to upskill their existing workforces, while individuals are seeking non-traditional venues to gain new skills and training to secure high-paying jobs. However, a major hurdle in accomplishing these goals is the antiquated ways in which educational institutions and employers provide records for education, training, and employment. What is needed is a universal Learning and Employment Record (LER) ecosystem that is distributed, interoperable, and open, allowing individuals to collect, store, own, and share self-verifying credentials that are issued and accepted by participating organizations. This requires platforms to provide privacy protection, verifiability, data portability, and scalability at the same time.
Why the U.S. Should Reject Central Bank Digital Currencies
Central banks across the world are exploring the possibility of developing their own digital currencies, known as CBDCs. In this groundbreaking whitepaper, the authors make the most comprehensive argument against CBDCs to date. Their message in brief? CBDCs will erode the distinction between America and authoritarianism.
Blockchain for Education: A New Credentialing Ecosystem
How might digital technology, and notably smart technologies based on artificial intelligence (AI), learning analytics, robotics, and others transform education? This book explores such a question. It focuses on how smart technologies are changing education in the classroom as well as the management of educational organizations and systems. ​
Chapter 11, "Blockchain for Education: A New Credentialing Ecosystem", provides an overview of blockchain technology and spotlights its use in education to create portable, interoperable, user-controlled digital credentials.
Academic Credentials in an Era of Digital Decentralization
Increasingly, the credential has emerged as a transnational, interdisciplinary signal of capability and skill in an environment where other characteristics—language, nationality, religious identity—cannot be presupposed. The essays in this volume give an account for the social functions served by the achievement, trust, and credentialing technologies that Learning Machine is producing. They ask what capability means and what credentials do in the social collectives that find them significant. Finally, they highlight the importance of individual self-determination under informational and organizational conditions in which issues of data invasiveness and control are central, if often technologically hidden, to the social fluidity that characterizes our time.
