Faith still strong after Mt. Gox

Despite losing a considerable amount of money on the Mt. Gox exchange, Australian Bitcoin Association Vice President Pantelis Roussakis is convinced that crypto-currencies are the way of the future.

“What I realized after Mt. Gox is that Bitcoin is about more than the money,” he said in an interview with the Cointelegraph. “It is a protocol to apply to human society – it’s clean, it’s self regulating.”

Roussakis, who delivered a TED Talk in late 2013 on the future of money, sees crypto-currencies as a way of adding value to personal interactions and volunteer labor.

“There are real world applications to this. I was talking to one charity recently which approaches banks for money to support its work. It’s strange because they’re begging for money from the same people who caused the problem. The thing is, the work that the charity is doing is real work. It has a real value. What if we were to have a currency that we pay people for doing this work? Then if the banks want to get involved they have to buy it.”

This payment for proof of work approach, Roussakis believes, could have far reaching implications for the economic and social structure of our society and the new paradigm is already underway, the Cointelegraph reported last week about the introduction of Permacredits, which are being used to support environmental projects.