Mark Lyn­der­say

?

It start­ed as a dis­cus­sion in two parts about Bit­coin and oth­er cryp­tocur­ren­cies, but it soon be­came a mi­cro-ref­er­en­dum on the ba­sic dif­fer­ences be­tween dig­i­tal cur­ren­cies and tra­di­tion­al fi­nan­cial sys­tems.

The talk fea­tured Richard Jo­bity, an econ­o­mist and busi­ness an­a­lyst who worked for a decade at the Cen­tral Bank and Shi­va Bisses­sar, a young tech­nol­o­gist, cur­rent­ly Man­ag­ing and Tech­ni­cal Di­rec­tor of Pina­ka Tech­nol­o­gy So­lu­tions who al­so wrote is MSc the­sis on cryp­tocur­ren­cies.

The two men pre­sent­ed to a small group gath­ered by the T&T Com­put­er So­ci­ety (TTCS) at UWI's Open Cam­pus two weeks ago.

At the cen­tre of their dif­fer­ing per­spec­tives that evening is the cen­tral is­sue that's emerg­ing out of this emer­gent vir­tu­al sys­tem for as­sign­ing val­ue and trad­ing it dig­i­tal­ly.

Bit­coin at its sim­plest is dig­i­tal cash, elec­tron­i­cal­ly cre­at­ed and stored and ac­cept­ed by mem­bers of its vir­tu­al com­mu­ni­ty as a medi­um of con­vey­ing val­ue.

In­tro­duced as open-source soft­ware in 2009 by the pseu­do­ny­mous de­vel­op­er Satoshi Nakamo­to, it is the best known of a new gen­er­a­tion of cryp­tocur­ren­cies; tech­nolo­gies pow­ered by the enor­mous com­plex­i­ty of cryp­tog­ra­phy al­go­rithms.