CoinDesk’s New Opinion Section: The Future of the Financial System Is Up for Debate

Announcing CoinDesk’s new opinion section, a place for discussions on the future of money and all the interesting questions that surround crypto and blockchain as ideas. 

Starting today, CoinDesk will be publishing daily columnists such as Preston Byrne, Jill Carlson, Nic Carter, HASU, Stephanie Hurder, Jeff Dorman, JP Koning, Yorke Rhodes, Byrne Hobart, William Mougayar, Leah Callon-Butler, Lex Sokolin, Kevin Kelly, Ajit Tripathi and James Cooper.

Wherever you stand on bitcoin as an actual payment system, or whether you think additive X-for-blockchain business ideas went too far, you have to admit they’ve spurred debate in interesting ways. 

Geopolitically important projects including central bank digital currencies (CBDCs), Libra, JPM Coin and many others were spawned from bitcoin (BTC). Together, they point to different futures for the financial system, the internet and our rights as digital citizens. These are all issues for discussion in February 2020 because of Satoshi Nakamoto’s writings in 2008. 

We plan to have fun conjecturing all this with the help of daily columnists, a diverse range of contributors, long-form interviews, books coverage and more. We want to bring you the best writers and writing every day, covering “generation crypto,” the shift to a new way of thinking.  

Today: Time for a safe harbor?

First up at the plate we have SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce – aka Crypto Mom – writing about her Safe Harbor proposal, a radical reframing of the debate about whether tokens should be treated as securities. She wants feedback. “I continue to urge people – this time in the words of Huey Lewis and the News – ‘If this is it, please let me know … if this is it, I want to know,'” she writes of the proposal. “If this is not it, I want to know that, too.”

In reply, Preston Byrne worries that decentralization – the yardstick for Peirce – will be hard to define and therefore unworkable. Olta Andoni and Donna Redel tell us how to improve on the proposal. Meanwhile Carol Von Cleef and Addison Yang argue it “may help identify and refine what may be feasible in the future,” even if it doesn’t actually pass into regulation itself.

Finally, our roving correspondent Jeff Wilser spends quality time with bitcoin OG Erik Voorhees in Colorado. Voorhees says about Libra: “The government is concerned because, if it becomes widely adopted, the dollar loses some of its value. Facebook has more users than the U.S. has citizens.”

We will have more wide-ranging, opinionated content for you in the coming weeks and months. We hope to create a space where reasonable people disagree but everyone is committed to pushing the conversation forward. 

If you want to comment, complain or are interested in contributing to CoinDesk’s opinion section, get in touch by sending ideas to opinion@coindesk.com.