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Unveiling the CBDC Revolution: Alyssa DiCaprio on Navigating the Future of Programmable Money
Get ready to unlock the secrets of the digital sovereign currency revolution with a deep dive into Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) alongside Alisa DiCaprio, Chief Economist at R3. We promise an episode brimming with insights as we traverse the nuanced world of CBDCs. Alisa, equipped with expertise from the blockchain powerhouse R3, helps us dissect the diverse implementations and consumer impacts of CBDCs while humorously navigating the ethical labyrinth of programmable money. This isn't just about transactions; it's about the future of financial freedom and control.
Prepare to have your perspective on CBDCs shifted as we explore their metamorphosis from mere payment instruments to complete payment systems. The hurdles in wholesale CBDC implementation, the delicate dance with existing financial infrastructures, and the intricate battle for consumer trust all come under our microscope. We wade through the legitimate concerns of government overreach and discuss the pivotal role of public education in adopting this transformative technology. It's an eye-opener into how digital currencies could reshape global transactions, fostering trust where it matters most.
Finally, we cast a spotlight on the ripple effects that CBDCs may unleash upon fintech and banking sectors, balancing innovation with the essential preservation of traditional banking models. As we jest about the currency forms of tomorrow, we reveal how CBDCs can empower unbanked populations and fuel fintech evolution, all without spelling doom for existing financial institutions. Join us for a candid exploration of this financial frontier and extend the dialogue at Money 2020 in Amsterdam - where the conversation on CBDCs continues to simmer with potential and promise.
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Ian Horne:Welcome to the Money Pot. I'm Ian Horne, the EU Head of Content at Money 2020. As some of you will know and you should know Money 2020 has an epic show in Europe coming up, and these next four episodes of the Money Pot podcast focus on the big topics that will light up our stages at the Rye in Amsterdam, and today we look at Central Bank digital currencies, or CBDCs as they're better known. This topic is huge, it's seriously huge, and we have a fantastic guest for it. But first, I also have a fantastic co-host today, and that co-host is the one and only Rachel Morrissey, our US Head of Content. Rachel, you've been doing this podcast far, far longer than me. You need no introduction, but hey, how's it going today? You ready to discuss the CBDCs?
Rachel Morrissey:Hey, sure, why not? It's always a good day to chat about stuff that I'm still trying to figure out, so I'm all ready for this. This will be fun.
Ian Horne:I love that. Why not? That's a British level of enthusiasm and I'll accept it openly. Rachel, I think we're going to have some fun here. Let's meet our interviewee, and that is, of course, Alisa DiCaprio, chief Economist at R3. Alisa, welcome to the Money Pot.
Alisa DiCaprio:Thank you for having me. I'm very excited about this conversation.
Ian Horne:Yeah, and it's huge, go ahead.
Rachel Morrissey:Alisa, I am by far the one who's out of the loop here. Ian is like super expert, wrote the book. He's interviewed you. You have a title of Chief Economist which I think I'm a little jealous of. I think I'm jealous of your title and so I just want to kind of get a little bit of baseline here. Could you tell me about R3 and tell me about your role at R3?
Alisa DiCaprio:Sure, absolutely. R3 is a blockchain platform company. We build the platform called Querta, and we started as a consortium of 42 banks back in 2016, I think. So we've always worked in the regulated oh my God.
Rachel Morrissey:It just feels that way in this industry, sorry 100% correct.
Alisa DiCaprio:So we've always worked in the regulated financial sector and over the past couple of years we've really turned to focus on capital markets, digital assets and, of course, central bank digital currencies, because it's really the entire world is looking at this technology. At the same time. There's a lot of demand In terms of my job as Chief Economist. I largely run our research and strategy program around everything that we do, so this includes digital assets, digital currencies, payments, trade, anything that we're working on. I do a lot of the thought leadership on it as well, as my team contributes to the monetary policy and financial stability reports that we do for our different clients, as well as help with kind of guiding the regulatory discussion and the policy discussion around central bank digital currencies.
Ian Horne:Yeah, okay, we'll try to unpack some of that, because it's huge, isn't it?
Rachel Morrissey:There's a lot I'm excited about this actually, yeah.
Ian Horne:This is going to be a good episode, isn't it? Rach, I think we're in a good place here, and Elisa, I think this is where we get down to business, right. So CBDC is what we're talking about is programmable digital money issued by central banks, which can build efficiency and speed into transactions, cross-border, and so on. Notionally, of course, it's controversial, because people could program it to allow governments to control how people spend their money, or so we're led to believe, and yeah, that's controversial. Who knew Elisa? Just to make the case for it, though, why would we want a central bank digital currency Like, why are we having this conversation in the first place?
Alisa DiCaprio:Well, I think I guess there's two reasons. The first is nobody would ever ask like why do we have cash? Right, because it's fairly clear why we have that. But if you look at the general trajectory of how payments have moved in the past few decades, it's really towards digitization. But when you're talking about digital payments, you're talking about private money. So you're using a credit card or you're using Apple Pay or Google Pay, and there's no way to do digital payments really with a currency that's been issued by the central bank, which you know. You can make this distinction between sovereign currency and private money, which I think us and this we in the space often do. I don't know that the person on the street would make that distinction, but so at the top level, the difference is it's a sovereign issued digital currency, as opposed to, you know, a digital form of money being issued by Mastercard or Visa.
Rachel Morrissey:Yeah, I think that's actually a really good point. The average person on the street would make no distinction between the idea of private, like they barely think of a credit card as a lending instrument. You know, like it's hard for them to kind of think of it in those categories like we're all kind of trained to. So I think that's a really good distinction for people to kind of understand, because we're looking forward to this and I think there's real reasons to have a CDC, a CBDC though, and. But I think it'd be very hard to explain that to the average person saying, well, it's a public money you don't be like. Well, we can talk you about.
Alisa DiCaprio:Yeah, I mean, I feel like there's some people that make the distinction, but most people will not. Maybe, if you describe it a little bit more, they might, but right now we know so little about consumer behavior in this space, it's a little confusing.
Rachel Morrissey:Yeah, so obviously they don't all operate in the same way. Cbdcs rolled out by a few places. They've all have different ways that they've rolled them out or reasons that they've rolled them out. So let's talk about why we are seeing some places roll out CBDCs and what that has created. Like what projects have you worked on, who have you worked with and what are you seeing them try to achieve with that?
Alisa DiCaprio:Well, I think okay. So I'm gonna answer this on two levels. So the first is like what's happened? We have seen a few live issuances not many, mostly by emerging economies, mostly a fairly simple issuance. So they're retail CBDCs, which means they're held by normal people, they can spend them. They're not really used for wholesale payments. So like bank-to-banks or like big corporate payments wouldn't use these CBDCs. China is a bit of an exception because it is doing a more complex rollout. So that's where we are today.
Alisa DiCaprio:The uptake or adoption of these CBDCs is very low, below 0.2% in every single market. So that's somewhat of a concern. So that's kind of the global view. And then where R3 is, we are working with countries that are now moving towards issuance. So some of them are emerging economies, some of them are not, which is certainly a difference. And now what we see is a difference also in the focus on retail versus wholesale. So there is we're bringing kind of wholesale back in and I think that's really a function of the research that's happened in the space, because this is it's a very new space. It's not always clear how this is going to interact with existing payment systems, but, as the BIS and the IMF and R3, put out more research about this, it becomes clearer what is the floor for a CBDC and what should we build off of for the next step.
Ian Horne:Yeah, you bet you can, so I wanted that I can get to his next thing oh maybe you're gonna mention the same thing that I'm gonna mention, ian, I'll bet you are. Let's see.
Rachel Morrissey:So you mentioned the research about maybe a shifting strategy for rollouts because of the nature of adoption and kind of bringing in the wholesale idea, when most all of these have been pretty simple retail rollouts. So what is the research telling you? Like, can you give me just a really short version of what the research is telling you about why this shift in strategy? I think the or the forming the shift in strategy maybe.
Alisa DiCaprio:Oh sure, well, okay. So my perception of this is that we started out CBDCs thinking of it as a payment instrument, so we're like we're gonna issue this new payment instrument, it's gonna be great. But now there's this thinking that it's more of a payment system, and so what does that mean? How does that integrate with existing payment systems? How you know, why do we need an additional payment system? Because that's a different question than why do we need a different payment instrument. So I think that's really the nature of the shift, and a specific example in terms of the research, like early research was kind of like should we have an interest rate or should we not? And the research today is pretty standard, saying it probably shouldn't have an interest rate, but it could. And so what are the other decisions we need to make? So there's a set of decisions now that we're no longer really talking about that much. They're still in play, but we have other problems to look at, which I think is really interesting. It gives us more scope to bring in additional questions.
Ian Horne:Yeah, and my question was adjacent to that. Actually it was more. What I'm interested in is the blockage for wholesale CBDC projects, because to my mind they're less objectionable than the retail CBDC. The amount of things that could go wrong to me seem and I'm not saying that retail CBDCs are necessarily objectionable, but, yeah, wholesale seem more straightforward to me. What's been stopping that from happening?
Alisa DiCaprio:Wholesale is definitely more straightforward. I think the use case is more complicated because with retail CBDCs, especially with the ones that have already been issued, there's a lot of discussion around. It can be used for remittances, it can be used for financial inclusion all of these things that existing payment systems don't do particularly well. Perhaps a retail CBDC could do that. Now, on the wholesale side, wholesale payments worked pretty well, especially if you have an RTGS system already, so the question of why you would issue a wholesale CBDC isn't as straightforward. However, I think there's a caveat to that, which is all the reasons that we're talking about issuing retail CBDCs remittances, financial inclusion. We don't actually see that being addressed yet in the live issuances.
Alisa DiCaprio:Part of this is because what I talked about earlier adoption is low, but part of it is we just this is very new. We don't really know how this is going On the wholesale side by having a wholesale CBDC. Yeah, it kind of replicates what you're already doing in wholesale payments, but then this gets to your point earlier, which is that it can be programmable. You can do a lot more things and it could update. One of the biggest problems that we have in the wholesale space is that you can do wholesale payments domestically using RTGS. It's fantastic, assuming you have an RTGS system. You can't do that internationally, and so CBDC is a really compelling potential solution to that, to making that a more efficient, easier process.
Ian Horne:Got you.
Rachel Morrissey:oh yeah, go ahead I just have a quick thing here. I am seeing this kind of weird dichotomy and I'm wondering if I'm guessing right here or I'm not. You can just tell me you're totally full of it. I'm totally fine with that. But I'm thinking about low adoption for the retail and I'm assuming one that it's hard to get out the word and educate people on how to adopt, because general population it's not always easy to educate the general population on anything like that's a hard thing to do. And then the other part of it is it's just the trust factor, right, but on the wholesale side it feels like that would be an easier population to educate and to build trust with. So I'm curious about that. Is my assumption there totally bizarrely wrong, or what would the research suggest about that?
Alisa DiCaprio:There's almost no research about it, so suggests nothing.
Rachel Morrissey:Hey guys, research Something to research.
Ian Horne:Yeah, but I'm with you, Rach. I think you're right there. I would agree with that hunch.
Alisa DiCaprio:I just wonder. No, I think it's absolutely correct. I mean, the one thing that I, the way I think about it, is if you have a good retail I'm sorry, wholesale payment system now and you bring in a CBDC, if the CBDC allows you to execute these transactions cheaper, it's going to take the entire market. If it's going to be more expensive than RTGS, no one will use it. So that's a little bit different than the retail story where you might use it for certain things and not others. Certain people might use it, not others, but on the wholesale side it's very much about cost.
Ian Horne:OK, ok, and let's go to the retail side again, because this is the part where we have all these kind of conversations, where people get concerned about government overreach and privacy. The idea is that if money is programmable, then a government can monitor or control your spending, or they could, if we want to be completely dystopian about this they could link your spending to a social credit score, or your account could be modified or shut down for whatever political or social reason. How legitimate are those concerns, and should we really take this into consideration before embracing CBDCs?
Alisa DiCaprio:Those are completely legitimate concerns. There's a couple of different things I've learned, I think, on the privacy side. The first is that different countries have different expectations about privacy. So in some regions people are completely happy to have governments have insight into their transactions in the same way that credit cards already do. Like when I go to the grocery store, my credit card knows I went to the grocery store. In fact, it's going to give me a readout at the end of the year and tell me what I've spent my money on. They know everything. Am I comfortable with my government having that Less? But different people in different regions are more willing. So in China, for example, consumers are more comfortable with the government having more information about them. Now, that being said, there's also the issue of, as I've worked with different central banks. No central bank actually wants that much insight into what you're buying. They don't care if you're going to buy a coffee in the middle of the day. They don't want that data.
Rachel Morrissey:In fact, if they don't have a vendetta against Starbucks and wait Sorry.
Alisa DiCaprio:But even more on the tech side. They would have to be keeping that data and absorbing that data and using that data somehow, and they don't do that today and that would be an enormous new set of tasks for them. They would need to hire new people to do it. They would need to put more systems in place to use it. So I don't see a lot of demand for governments secretly trying to track transactions.
Alisa DiCaprio:But I guess the third point about this is sort of AML-CFT. Somebody needs to be tracking this and if there is, say, a sanction issued against an individual, somebody needs to be able to go in and see what they have been doing. And so that's where there's a little bit of variation, particularly in the newer issuances where this has been considered much more carefully. So how much are you tracking? Do you have the ability? If there's a sanction situation or a legal requirement that comes in and says we need to know what this person's been doing with their money, can you go back into the system and pull that information, which exists, but it's either anonymized or the central bank doesn't have direct access to it. But you need to be able to have that in case of that situation.
Rachel Morrissey:It's interesting because I remember years ago I realized CBDCs in crypto were not the same thing. But there's a loose relation here, especially in the nature of trust and anonymity and privacy. And I think I had this conversation years ago with a guy who was actually from the FBI that I sat next to on a plane and he asked what I did. And then he asked about Bitcoin because it was a big concern back then in the nature of the anonymity and the reputation for the dark website of it and all of that was still very active. This was a long time ago and what I explained to him I was like well, really, the anonymity only exists at the exchanges. They don't really exist in the transactions. You can trace it, and that was a brand new idea to him.
Rachel Morrissey:And then when some of these other companies formed that broke that code through and provided the track, there is a strange legitimization of Bitcoin because it could be tracked and the anonymity could be broken. So one of the functions of it was actually preventing its sense of trust. And then when that was decoded, then the sense of trust in it, especially from institutions, kind of got re-established. And so I'm curious about this with CBDCs, this kind of same sort of trajectory of trust and how you could increase trust in it, because there's one thing about your government knowing you, but there's also a sense of a vulnerable. It feels like there's a vulnerability to it that I think people wonder about whenever they're encountering something new. Is there any sense that trust in it is is easily broken? Beyond the government knowing your stuff, can other people know your stuff and what does that mean?
Alisa DiCaprio:Oh, I see you know, after being in this space for so long, we do talk about trust a lot. I would really like to see some research on it. I mean, I would not have too much of a problem, I think, myself using a central bank digital currency, knowing what I know, which is that the governments that we work with don't wanna track it. They don't wanna know what you're doing. They're not building that into their systems. But the way that we've done CBDC so far is that it's issued by a central bank and then distributed by commercial banks, and commercial banks are regulated. So commercial banks have to be tracking what you're doing. They have to.
Alisa DiCaprio:You're not gonna be able to, like, send money and they don't know where it's going, like, no bank would think that was okay. So it's more a question of like, are you okay with your bank having this information, which they already have, with everything that you're doing? So I think I mean, this is obviously just my view and it's based on very little evidence because we just don't have any, but I think maybe it's a story about kind of how we're explaining this to the market and right now, because there isn't really much of a market, we're kind of explaining it to each other. So I think, like what I'm waiting for is for people to start using it and see what they do, because, as we know from economics, people rational people would do one thing, but normal people do a completely different thing, and so that may very well be the case with this. We don't know yet.
Ian Horne:Yeah, I've got a few questions off the back of that, actually. I mean, one is obviously the concern is only if a central bank really takes this to the nth degree. I mean, are there, for instance this is a quick question are there nations that you wouldn't work with?
Alisa DiCaprio:I don't need you to name them.
Ian Horne:I'm just wondering, just in principle are there? I don't want to get you in trouble on anyone's hit list or anything like that, I'm just wondering are there governments that you would actually say, no, let's maybe not build this?
Alisa DiCaprio:Well, I think it's less a question about the governments, because I think some of the most difficult places to work in the world are the emerging economies, are developing economies, and there are some of the places where this is absolutely most needed in terms of financial inclusion, in terms of giving people more opportunities to use the money that they have. So I wouldn't say so. I'm dancing around your answer a little bit because I'm not sure that that's the right way to approach it. I think the right way to approach it is why are governments doing this? Because this is expensive, it's difficult. You're introducing a new payment system, so you're gonna have a lot of stakeholders in your domestic economy.
Alisa DiCaprio:This is why we see it happening in emerging economies. First, because they just have simpler banking systems, so it's easier to do it and it takes a lot longer. If you have a complex banking system like the EU or the US, with a very sort of tiered regulatory system, that also makes it challenging. So I think it's more about why the government is doing it and there's not. I mean, I haven't been in contact with any governments that are doing this for like nefarious purposes. They all seem to be doing it with stakeholders, with the idea that they want adoption and you're not gonna get adoption. If you're tracking something Like, if you are doing this to track transactions, no consumer will use it. No consumer wants that. So I think there's that's like a sort of an additional nuance to your question. Is, if a government wants to do it for that reason, no one's gonna use it.
Ian Horne:And so that's go ahead.
Rachel Morrissey:Kills the market.
Ian Horne:Yeah, it's a good response because that is a pig of a question. To be completely honest, my follow-up part to it is obviously your day-to-day working on, you know, the CBDCs I lost. I lost what CBDCs there was for a second there. You're working on CBDCs and you must go on Twitter or LinkedIn like the rest of us and see some fairly incendiary posts about it, very kind of polarizing conversations about it. Is there anything that you see online, any misconceptions or misunderstandings that you regularly see that kind of make you wanna pull your hair out?
Alisa DiCaprio:Um constantly and many Um. But I think I actually really appreciate that, even where it's where it's wrong, because I think the skepticism is what keeps consumers safe, because if we were all just agreeing that this is a great idea and like let's go do it, then who knows what would happen Like that seems like that would be a bad outcome. So so I appreciate that there are politicians, uh and and other voices that are maybe more negative about this, because they force us to have a stronger story and to make sure that we actually are paying attention to these issues that they think are dangerous, regardless of how legitimate they actually are.
Rachel Morrissey:So just to shift this a little bit and just kind of get to maybe a little more hopeful side, uh, the notion of where CBDCs can really make an impact are, like you said, in the, in the emerging economies, where they're needed the most, where, um, one of the bigger factors in the economy is often remittances, where you know, uh, this kind of technology could be incredibly useful. And so, if we're talking about that, like what, what story can you tell us about the nature of the interoperability of this and how that could make a big difference for a lot of these emerging um economies and and nations that are really trying to stabilize, uh, economically?
Alisa DiCaprio:Interesting. Okay, I thought you were going to go in a very different direction, so uh, okay.
Rachel Morrissey:Sorry.
Alisa DiCaprio:I had it all prepared in my head and now it's gone. Sorry.
Ian Horne:I asked you a question no.
Alisa DiCaprio:I think okay. So I'll stick with the interoperability question because I think I think it's a, it's a useful one and and you know people always, always ask about it, the okay. So, in terms of interoperability with existing payment systems, I mean we touched on it a little bit, um about how it is just kind of it's a new instrument and it's going to interact with everything else in your economy. So how's that going to work? Um, but the question about interoperability, I think happens at a number of different levels that maybe people don't always recognize. Um, so you know the. The first would be how does it interoperate with your domestic payment system? Right, how does it interoperate with your uh, real time settlement systems? But then there's this other level, which is okay. You're going to do it on, say, you're doing CBDC cross-border. Well then, that's a whole different level.
Alisa DiCaprio:So how is it interacting with other CBDCs? How is the CBDC interacting with foreign fiat currencies? How are you doing the foreign exchange transactions? Is it going to be like digital assets, where, when they're natively issued on blockchain, they have to trade on a digital exchange and they can't trade on the kind of traditional exchanges? And traditional exchanges can't trade on the, or traditional instruments can't trade on the digital exchanges, so you're stuck with this kind of like dichotomy of of digital assets. So I think that becomes a really, really critical issue and and we see people looking at it Right.
Alisa DiCaprio:So the BIS is looking at this with, like Mariana um Enbridge, then certainly the, the different countries are, are um interacting in different ways, a kind of like side note. I'm very interested in what's happening on the on the regional integration side, because we're seeing, you know there's like your traditional regions, so you have like Southeast Asia or ASEAN as a region, africa as a region, but now that we have CBDCs, like Enbridge is becoming they're not natural trading partners, so it's it's very interesting to see these countries coming together in different groups that we're not used to this, this kind of like almost economic reorganization. So I think it is having that impact also, which is fascinating.
Rachel Morrissey:That is interesting, definitely.
Ian Horne:Yeah, yeah, that's got me thinking, cause I yeah, I haven't even looked at that. I'm aware of these names. They always name these um MCBDC projects really interestingly, don't they? Um, but I hadn't realized there were some different um partnerships coming about. Anyway, there's something else I'd like to get into as well. Um, rach, if you're happy to move on from that question, um, you've mentioned the role of of banks, and I think, if we broaden this out, we can look at the role of FinTech as well. If people are banking directly with a central bank, what does that mean for the FinTech and banking ecosystem? Because I think some of these concerns have been kind of elated at this point. But initially there were real fears that a CBDC could lead to disintermediation. It could cut entire um business models out of the financial ecosystem. Um, so yeah, my question to you, Alisa, is is what happens there? If we are doing things directly with a central bank and money's programmable, what does it mean for FinTech?
Alisa DiCaprio:Well, I think okay, so I'll start with maybe a um, a point that you made. What happens if people have accounts at the central bank? Um, there's almost no country, or there's no country that I'm aware of, that is doing that. Um in, in all cases, the central bank issues this, the central bank digital currency, and it's being distributed by commercial banks. So they, they still have to go through regulated financial entities, the same ones that they were interacting with before. Um, so they, they don't. You don't have individuals with accounts at the central bank yet Doesn't mean you won't, but not yet.
Alisa DiCaprio:And that was made for the very specific reason is we don't want banking disintermediation. We've done a number of different studies about what adoption would look like, how to avoid banking disintermediation, and there's kind of two issues. You're going to issue a central bank digital currency. You have to buy it. You're not just going to give it to people, because that would expand your money supply for no clear reason. So you're going to have people exchange it for something and so whatever they're exchanging for, that central bank digital currency, is going to decline as a part of the money supply, because now that's back at the central bank, and so that could lead to banking disintermediation because banks need deposits. Deposits are what they use to give loans and allow for credit issuance. So on the one hand, it's going to hurt or it's going to reduce the amount of liquidity available for some parts of the financial system, but on the other side and this is true of any technology it's going to give a lot of new opportunities for new services. So maybe I don't have access to a bank today and I still don't for some reason, for my own purposes, maybe don't want a relationship with a bank, but I would like a CBDC. So I would then go to a bank as the wallet provider to get my CBDC and there I have a relationship with the bank. So the bank has just gained a new customer.
Alisa DiCaprio:So we will see that a little bit and we've certainly seen that in the ideation around the different use cases for these markets. So to close up with, how is CBDC going to affect fintechs and banks and is it going to disintermediate them? There certainly will be a little. There will be changes. They won't be dramatic. I mean, in terms of the calculations we've done, they are not huge shifts with everybody taking all their money out of it. It's not like SVB, where everybody just takes all their money out and there's no money left for the bank. It's going to be more of moving money into different areas that regulated financial institutions will then. I mean, their job is to make money, so they're going to look for different opportunities. Yeah, exactly.
Rachel Morrissey:I actually that actually makes. It will create new opportunities, even as it maybe shifts the nature of where things are. That's what fintech is all about anyway, so that sounds really good.
Ian Horne:Yeah, for sure. And when we look at CBDCs as well, am I right in thinking that the banks you're working with they're not looking to make CBDCs the entirety of the money supply in any nation they're within, aren't they? Because there's lots of different, coexisting types of currency at present? Am I right in thinking that nobody's trying to go? Yeah, we only use CBDCs now.
Alisa DiCaprio:Oh no. I mean, I think everybody learned from the kind of cashless economy stuff that Sweden was doing a number of years ago not with CBDC. They were just trying to move cashless and it didn't work. And why didn't it work? Because they were like, oh, this is actually taking away power from a number of different groups, right, the elderly tend to use cash, the very young use cash, immigrants use cash. So if you're trying to be an egalitarian society, you want to make sure everybody has access to everything that you're doing. So cash is always going to be one part of that. Credit cards are going to be part of that. Cbdc can be a part of it. But to your point, yeah, no one is looking to take the entire market. That would be weird and also it would reduce competition and destroy a lot of your private sector, which is probably not a great idea.
Ian Horne:Yeah, I totally hear you and it's funny. I've been asked about this question after writing my book on this, and it's funny if you ask about the crime angles as well and they always say you know, will you use crypto for crime, or you know what's the best thing for that? And the worst thing is I've ended up saying to people oh, use cash. And I feel like I'm endorsing crime and telling people how to do that, which is absolutely not my intention. If you listen to this, don't do a crime, try to do fewer crimes if you're already doing crimes, and I'll leave it at that. But thank you, Alisa, that's not doing crime. That's not doing crime. Yeah, crime is bad. I learned that at the age of maybe five or six. Crime is bad. Don't do it, just know, anyway. Anyway, Alisa, that is sorry. Your answer is far more sensible than mine. That was really interesting and a really great overview of CBD season where we're at. Rachel, do you have anything else to add?
Rachel Morrissey:No, I really enjoyed this conversation, though. Thank you so much, Alisa, for coming on.
Ian Horne:Yeah, thank you, and that, unfortunately, is it for this episode of the Money Pot. Again, thank you, Alisa, for joining us today and if you want to hear more from her, Alisa will be speaking at Money 2020 in June at the RAI in Amsterdam and we hope to see you there.
Rachel Morrissey:And, of course, you can be part of the Money Pot at our Money 20/20 shows. So please send your pitches to podcast at money2020.com and don't forget to follow us wherever you listen to your podcasts. Thank you so much for listening. We love our fintech nerds.
