Charlie Shrem has been thinking about currency and money his whole life, but even more so during the last year. Shrem was at the forefront of bitcoin’s early beginnings, one of the first ten people to even know what bitcoin was. In 2012, he founded his startup BitInstant, a bitcoin exchange platform – and it went through the roof. But Shrem overstepped his limits, and since he was operating without a license, he was sent to prison for one year.

In prison, Shrem quickly realised that there was a good’s market of its own. But in it, neither dollars nor euros or bitcoin were used as the common currency, but mackerel. That got Shrem thinking: How could an ordinary thing like mackerel suddenly become a form of money? What does value really mean? And what does this mean for established currencies as well as cryptocurrencies? Together with your help, we and Charlie Shrem want to explore these – and more – questions. We will open up the discussion of these topics in a workshop-like lecture to find out what it is that makes money money.

Above all, however, we want to find out what all this means for central banks and commercial financial institutes institutions, which live in a world of negative interest rates, demonetization efforts and dwindling trust in established currencies. Can cryptocurrencies really replace traditional money? And how will we pay our bills in a cashless economy?

Join us on June 14th at the WU Campus to answer these questions together.

To attend this free lecture you need to register on Eventbrite.

http://forbes.at/forbes-lecture-the-end-of-money/