Jem Bendell: Making Heads or Tails of Bitcoin

If you’ve heard about Bitcoin on the evening news or seen a headline about it, you might have been left with the impression that it’s some sort of online scam or the next Dutch tulip bubble. But Bitcoin and other cryptographic currencies are very real.

Our guest this week on Sea Change Radio is Jem Bendell, a professor of sustainability leadership at the University of Cumbria, the world’s first public university to accept Bitcoin for tuition payments. He explains how Bitcoin works and why he thinks it might help us move beyond the inadequacies and inequities of central bank-controlled currencies toward a sharing economy. Bitcoin has its critics to be sure, but, as New Yorker columnist James Surowiecki has so aptly put it, “the value of currency is, ultimately, what someone will give you for it…”  Listen now as host Alex Wise and Jem Bendell discuss how Bitcoin is valued and the promise crytpographic currency holds for the sustainability movement.