Cryptocurrency and the Blockchain
Michael Casey
If you were talking to a financial planner about your retirement plan five or ten years ago, it’s unlikely ‘cryptocurrency’ or ‘the blockchain’ would have featured. But this technology represents a paradigm change that we can’t ignore. The blockchain is here to stay.
That’s the view espoused by Michael Casey, co-author of The Age of Cryptocurrency, in which he and Paul Vigna demystify the cryptocurrency phenomenon. Cybermoney, they claim, is poised to launch a revolution, one that could reinvent traditional financial and social structures while bringing the world’s billions of “unbanked” individuals into a new global economy. Cryptocurrency holds the promise of a financial system without a middleman, one owned by the people who use it and one safeguarded from the devastation of a 2008-type crash.
Currently located in New York, Michael Casey grew up in Perth and completed a Bachelor of Commerce at The University of Western Australia. His subsequent career as an auditor was short lived and he completed a Graduate Diploma in Journalism at Curtin University of Technology a few years later.
Most of Casey’s career has been spent as a journalist, including 18 years at The Wall Street Journal (along with Paul Vigna). He was a senior columnist covering global economics and markets and a frequent TV and radio commentator. He credits this global exposure and experience as the defining feature of his career. International Journalism teaches you that the perspective you might have inside one country is the result of the cultural and other factors that shape it, while there is a completely different viewpoint to be had from a different culture. It also highlights the inequity in the global economy, made more visible in the digital age.
Casey moved on from his column about global financial and economic affairs in 2015 and began advising governments and businesses on the deployment of digital currency and blockchain technologies. Since then his career has diversified to author, researcher, teacher, mentor, communicator, advisor and entrepreneur. As Senior Advisor with MIT Media Lab, Casey creates blockchain related products for developing countries and educates people about the complex yet fascinating potential of cryptocurrency, and its disruption on the global financial system.
He is Senior Lecturer at MIT Sloan School of Management and a frequent public speaker. He seeks to advance public understanding of the potential for digital innovation to further public good.