The Next Generation of Currency

"This program is produced by the Advertising Department of WIRED and sponsored by BNY Mellon. CLICK HERE FOR BNY MELLON DISCLOSURES"

Can someone who work in advertising shed light on how native advertising is sold, produced and evaluated by the stakeholders?

Namely are the article's objectives/editorial aim determined by the advertisers. Who has ultimate editorial discretion?

How does one evaluate the effect of native advertising? Or is it currently mostly used to build "brand recognition" for the advertiser?

Comes on very strong with the tale of currency replacing barter as a means of exchange, which I thought was very convincingly challenged in David Graeber's book Debt.

I can't immediately tell if M-Pesa is a digital currency in of itself or a P2P payment platform.

I'd personally be skeptical of any centralized virtual currencies as their inherent lack of tangibility means they could easily be seized, shut down voluntarily w/o compensation or crippled by regulatory interference. There's been several spectacular failures of this sort, including Beenz, Flooz and InternetCash - all examples of dot-com flops, as well. A whole bunch of others are around in the present. These should best be treated as toys, if even used at all.

The cheapness of Bitcoin is significantly overstated by focusing only on high-level aspects of conducting transactions and not on the more deeply technical implications.

Finally, the article's assertion that banks will have to evolve from being mere transferers to providing more services sounds anachronistic, given that this has been the case for quite a long time already.

One mistake here is that moving Bitcoin is not essentially free. It is also getting more expensive. The essentially free part is moving value within a private network, but that could be done with any currency.

I can't wait until we don't have to deal with printing and scanning receipts.

Now all we can do is hope that this really will become more popular :D