This Is What Happened When They Tried To Fix Journalism Using Blockchain
Odd Lots
Bloomberg
4.5 • 2K Ratings
🗓️ 24 September 2020
⏱️ 43 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Back in 2017, during the Bitcoin boom, there were a number of different attempts to use blockchain technology to improve a host of businesses and industries. Many of those were cynical attempts to cash in on the bubble, but some did have loftier ambitions. On this episode of Odd Lots, we speak with Maria Bustillos, who was the co-founder of a project called Civil, which aimed to fund a series of newsrooms, backed by their own Ethereum-based token. Maria talked about what the vision was, why it didn't work, and the lessons learned for journalism business models and new endeavors.
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| 0:15.4 | targeting the toughest diseases, a new podcast by Bloomberg Media Studios and Vertex Pharmaceuticals. Welcome to Crash Course, a podcast about business, political and social disruption, and what we can learn from it. |
| 0:33.7 | I'm Tim O'Brien. Every week on Crash Course I'm going to bring listeners directly into |
| 0:39.2 | the arenas where epic upheavals occur and I'm going to explore the lessons we can learn when creativity and ambition collide with competition and power. |
| 0:49.4 | Listen to Crash Course every Tuesday on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your |
| 0:55.8 | podcasts. Hello and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots podcast I'm Joe Weisenthall. |
| 1:13.4 | Unfortunately my colleague Tracy Alaway is out again this week so it's just going to be me |
| 1:19.4 | and I'm going to be talking again kind of about the broader crypto world, but I think a really interesting |
| 1:27.8 | different story this time. |
| 1:29.8 | So listeners might remember that in 2017 during the last cryptocurrency boom when |
| 1:37.6 | Bitcoin was taking off, there were all these follow-on coin offerings. |
| 1:41.6 | And beyond just that, beyond just other coins are all these |
| 1:44.3 | ideas about how different industries could be transformed via blockchain |
| 1:50.1 | technology in some way or tokens or their own |
| 1:53.6 | cryptocurrencies and there were stories about putting |
| 1:57.3 | banana trade on the blockchain with a currency and dentistry |
| 2:02.0 | having its own currency and all kinds of weird things |
| 2:05.8 | that never really took off tomatoes there was a famous story about putting the |
| 2:10.3 | tomato trade on the blockchain anyway none of that has really taken off and at the time when a lot of this was going on I thought a lot of these |
| 2:19.1 | endeavors were kind of cynical just attempting to cash in on the hot market for coins in general |
| 2:26.0 | without much purpose. But some of the projects actually did seem sincere and today we're going to be talking about one such project that did |
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