Fwd: Making New Money with Quinn DuPont - CITO Seminar Fri 3/Oct 4pm IST
Gianluca Miscione
From: Allen Higgins <allen....@ucd.ie>
Date: Tue, Sep 16, 2025 at 3:29 PM
Subject: Making New Money with Quinn DuPont - CITO Seminar Fri 3/Oct 4pm IST
To:
It is our pleasure to invite you to a seminar by Quinn DuPont titled:
“Making New Money: How autonomous communities produce and govern cryptocurrencies.”
Where: in Q233 Quinn Building and via Zoom.
When: Fri 3/Oct 4pm IST.
Please register to attend in-person and/or participate via Zoom on the day.
https://forms.gle/dxcrC4mqnoB9Q8tL7
Abstract: Decentralized cryptocurrencies are upending the foundations of economic power, challenging centuries of state and bank control over money. This research critically examines the rise of digital wildcat banking and its profound implications for economic sovereignty. Leveraging digital forensics, data science, and OSINT, this work reveals who actually produces and governs cryptocurrencies—and how their collective labor reshapes value and risk. It explores the forces behind decentralized money, the vulnerabilities these systems introduce, and the future role of state-issued currencies in an era of rapid monetary transformation.
Reflecting on the project Quinn notes:
"I've been working on this for well over a year now, and while it is still in development, the basic outline is complete. I make some pretty provocative claims, like arguing that global forces first emerging in the 1970s lead us inexorably to this point where the labour required to produce and govern new money has become involuted[1]. It’s a unique project that reveals how new money is made and details the implications for banks, nation states, and society. I also have some fun stories to share, like my effort to vampire attack Trump's WLFI token or my reverse engineering of the FBI's Operation Token Mirrors."
This seminar will be held in-person and via video link. The session will be recorded for future release on the CITO podcast. We hope you will join us for this timely and important discussion.
[1] Involution; the theory from Clifford Geertz where, in the original context, rice production becomes internally competitive and the processes require more labour without an increase in output - analogous to this story of technological development and precarious technological labour. I argue that the operational infrastructure of crypto expands to require more labour, despite no correlated increase in output. Thus, crypto overtakes national currencies not by meeting a market demand, but by accommodating excess labour supply.