Thammasat University students interested in business, economics, sociology, technology, artificial intelligence, anthropology, ethnography, and related subjects may find it useful to participate in a free 13 November Zoom book talk webinar on Tokens: The Future of Money in the Age of the Platform.
The event, on Monday, 13 November 2023 at 4pm Bangkok time, is presented by the Department of Sociology, Hong Kong University (HKU).
The TU Library collection includes several books about different aspects of digital tokens.
Students are invited to register at this link:
https://hkuems1.hku.hk/hkuems/ec_regform.aspx?guest=Y&UEID=90929
The event announcement states:
Platform capitalism is coming for the money in your pocket.
Wherever you look, money is being replaced by tokens. Digital platforms are issuing new kinds of money-like things: phone credit, shares, gift vouchers, game tokens, customer data—the list goes on. But what does it mean when online platforms become the new banks? What new types of control and discrimination emerge when money is tied to specific apps or actions, politics or identities?
Tokens opens up this new and expanding world. Exploring the history of extramonetary economies, Rachel O’Dwyer shows that private and grassroots tokens have always haunted the real economy. But as the large tech platforms issue new money-like instruments, tokens are suddenly everywhere. Amazon’s Turk workers are getting paid in gift cards. Online streamers trade in wishlists. Foreign remittances are sent via phone credit. Bitcoin, gift cards, NFTs, customer data, and game tokens are the new money in an evolving economy. It is a development challenging the balance of power between online empires and the state. Tokens may offer a flexible even subversive route to compensation. But for the platforms them- selves they can be a means of amassing frightening new powers.
An essential read for anyone concerned with digital money, inequality, and the future of the economy.
The speaker will be Dr. Rachel O’Dwyer, a lecturer at the School of Visual Culture at the National College of Art & Design, Dublin, Ireland.
She is the author of Tokens: The Future of Money in the Age of the Platform, which is available to TU students through the TU Library Interlibrary Loan (ILL) service.
The event will be moderated by Associate Professor Tom McDonald, who teaches Sociology at HKU. His faculty biography states:
I am a media anthropologist dedicated to using ethnographic engagement to achieve a richer understanding of how digital technologies, media and material culture come to mediate ongoing transformations in the communicative practices, economic behaviours, social relationships and human subjectivities of people in China and beyond. […]
My research increasingly focuses on economic concerns, reflecting the rapid convergence between digital money and media in China and the wider world. I have recently completed two major projects in this area. The first concerns the adoption of digital payment and consumer finance platforms and their impact in shaping financial subjectivities. The second examines the potential of digital money in facilitating everyday cross-boundary money transactions.
I am currently in the early stages of a new project examining how NFTs are transforming processes of collection, exchange and production in the Hong Kong art market.
In July, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) published on its website a free text for download prepared by José M. Garrido, Digital Tokens: A Legal Perspective.
It noted that
tokens are units digitally represented in a distributed ledger or blockchain. The various uses of this technology have the potential to transform a wide array of economic activities, from traditional commercial transactions to sophisticated financial undertakings. This paper explores the similarities and differences of tokens with traditional legal instruments in commercial law and how tokens could offer superior solutions, provided that proper legal foundations are established for their operation, including aspects of the law of securities and consumer protection law.
The article’s Executive Summary:
Digital tokens represent a revolutionary innovation for economic activities. Based on developments in cryptography and particularly in Decentralized Ledger Technology (DLT) and equivalent techniques, tokens are digital items that cannot be forged and whose transfer is traceable and economical.
The potential applications of tokens are multiple in commerce, finance, and many other economic areas. This paper connects tokens with the traditional doctrine of commercial instruments. By identifying the fundamental principles that originated in commercial practice with the incorporation of rights to negotiable instruments, the paper analyzes to what extent tokens can perform functionally equivalent roles to those of the existing instruments in commerce and finance.
Tokens have the potential of replacing existing commercial instruments and of performing additional economic functions.
Tokens have greater flexibility than traditional commercial instruments and can be deployed in any economic activity. DLT and similar technologies that enable the use of tokens are still evolving and are implementing solutions to ensure efficiency and scalability of operations.
If these issues are addressed, tokens have the potential of becoming the lynchpin of the new digital economy.
This paper uses a classification based on the rights that each token affords. Some tokens do not include any right at all and only have extrinsic value based on social consensus (i.e., native tokens, also known as crypto currencies), but other tokens are connected to rights in the virtual sphere, and others are connected to rights to off-line assets or services.
Tokens connected to rights have immense potential, but also raise challenges from the legal point of view. The law’s intervention is indispensable in establishing an enforceable link between tokens and the off-line reality, and in ensuring the correspondence between the tokens and the off-line assets or services.
Fundamental legal rules are necessary to provide legal certainty to the operation of tokens.
Apart from establishing legal rules for the connection of tokens with off-line reality, the law needs to provide responses to fundamental questions such as the legal rules for the transfer of tokens (including rules for loss, for illegal transfers and for good faith acquisition), the creation of security interests, the impact of insolvency, the use of enforcement actions, and eventually, jurisdictional and conflict of law rules for legal relationships involving tokens.
These legal issues will need to be addressed by all countries, irrespective of their legal traditions, and need to be resolved for all economic uses of tokens.
Legal systems need to establish clear criteria to distinguish tokens that are subject to securities laws. Tokens can be used to replace traditional securities, and in such cases, the rules of securities law need to be adapted and applied. The law should establish clear rules to distinguish tokens that are securities from tokens that perform other functions.
Extending securities law to tokens that are not securities can produce undesirable results and stifle economic innovation. Consumer protection and market functioning rules should be adapted to the needs of the new digital economy.
For most tokens that perform economic functions but cannot be classified as securities, the law should respect innovation and take an enabling approach.
This may require only some additional changes in commercial law, apart from the fundamental legal rules common to all uses of tokens.
At the same time, tokens that are used in legal relationships with consumers should be subject to consumer protection rules. These rules need to be adapted to the special characteristics of tokens to offer equivalent protection to that of traditional economic relationships.
Aside from regulating bilateral relationships, one of the key features of the new digital economy is the multilateral and decentralized nature of numerous activities. This may involve regulating markets for tokens and token intermediaries to ensure a smooth and fair functioning of those new activities.
Solid legal foundations can support the technological development of tokens, which in turn may result in significant economic benefits. The law can help a wider use of tokens across the economy, and this can result in significant gains in liquidity, cost reduction and enhanced security. Legislators should pay particular attention to the importance of legal frameworks in supporting innovative technologies.
(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)