PSA Today #21: Kaliya and Seth welcome Dave Birch on Digital Financial Services and “Smart” Money

Dave Birch is an author, advisor and commentator on digital financial services. He is a recognised international thought leader in digital identity and digital money. More at Dgwbirch.com. In today’s episode, we talk about his new book “Currency Cold War” and relationship, and lack thereof, between digital currency and identity. Dave describes how smart money is digital currency that embodies its community. We talk about how data is NOT the new oil. And Dave responds to Paul Graham’s recent suggestion that Stripe is the next Google with the key insight “data about payments is more valuable than payments themselves.” We talk about the idea of community-level digital currencies (ie a NY coin vs just a USA coin, or different ethnic currencies) as well as the emergence of QR codes as a vision for the future of post-pandemic, community commerce.