09/25/2022
By Patricia Morena

Save the date to bring your class to the Crypto Currency debate on October 27 11 am at Alumni Hall.

The GE2 and Wilson Center for Entrepreneurship invite faculty to bring your class to a lively debate about the pros and cons of Crypto Currency. Pizza will be provided at the event.

Event: Crypto Currency: Today’s Fad or Tomorrow’s Technology with Jack Wilson & Bill Johnson.
Date: Thursday, October 27
Time: 11 a.m. – Noon
Location: Alumni Hall

We are happy to register your students for this event. Send the class roster to patricia_morena@uml.edu.

Contact patricia_morena@uml.edu for more information on these events.

More on the debaters and cryptocurrency:

Jack M. Wilson, Distinguished Professor - Emeritus:
Crypto, like other Ponzi schemes from Tulips to Bernie Madoff, make the early investors rich and impoverish the later investors ("greater fools”) by selling things with no tangible value. Crypto advocates, who must convince the greater fools to invest, tout the “new new thing” and the “freedom” from government control. Sadly, billions of dollars have been lost in Ponzi schemes, rug pulls, pump and dump, ransomware, money laundering, and other scams, while trillions have been lost by later investors as early investors became wealthy. The touted technologies have looked interesting at small scale and threaten the planet at large scale.

Bill Johnson, Associate Professor of Finance, Manning School of Business:
Blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies have driven technological change in the realms of electronic payments, distributed computing, decentralized finance, smart contracts, data storage, and the governance of organizations. Rather than enabling corporate entities to build proprietary empires that exploit their users, the open-source nature of this technology enables entrepreneurs and users. There are powerful vested interests in banking, government, law enforcement, and education that do not wish to see this disruptive technology succeed. With new technology comes the potential for abuse, but the scale of abuse in the crypto space is miniscule compared to the potential for this important new technology.