We've heard it over and over again, Covid-19 has plunged us into a crisis like none other we’ve experienced in our lifetime. Although it is primarily a public health issue, it is also having a major impact on the global economy and financial system. Many businesses have been forced to shut down sparking debates on whether this is supply or demand shock. Wall Street proclaims that any increase in economic activity is a good sign. However, Jim Bianco, President and Macro Strategist at Bianco Research, says a return to 90% of pre-crisis level will still not be enough to recover. Bianco Research is a Chicago-based firm that provides research and analysis for institutional finance. Jim started to take serious notice of the Covid-19 outbreak back in January. Since then he has been sharing his views on the long- term, macroeconomic consequences of the pandemic. He brings an enormous amount of clarity and insight into this issue. Topics covered in this episode: Jim’s background on Wall Street and how he transitioned into researchWhy he was so early to talk about the pandemic and the crisisThe lessons learned from this pandemic and what’s nextWhat long-term economic and societal trends we can expectThe FED: their response, the effects on the economy and where we go from hereJim’s views on UBI and the legitimacy of taxes if states can just print moneyThe US debt problem caused by the slowing of international tradeThe US dollar as a reserve currency and how it could be displacedThe prospect of crypto-based reserve currencies and the disruption of central banksHow close are we to Crypto and Bitcoin becoming an asset class in the traditional finance systemJim’s visions for the post virus worldEpisode links: Bianco Research“Is the Fed Making it Better?” Reset Everything TalkJim Bianco TwitterBianco Research YoutubeWTF Happened In 1971?Mainnet 2020 – Messari's Flagship Crypto Event (June 1 to 3)Free tickets to Web 3.0 Forum (June 8 to 10)Sponsors: Least Authority: Learn how Zero-Knowledge Access Passes can help you build a more privacy-minded business by disconnecting payment and user data. - http://www.leastauthority.com/zkapsThis episode is hosted by Sebastien Couture & Brian Fabian Crain. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/342

The internet was originally created as a platform to communicate freely, but it soon became a place where people could be monitored, controlled, and censored. 98% of content on the internet is deleted every 20 years. More surprisingly, based on a Twitter study, a third of links change their content fundamentally or are removed completely, within three months of their creation.  Arweave is a new data storage protocol that enables economically sustainable permanence for the very first time. Built on a blockchain-like structure called the blockweave, one of the applications on Arweave is what they have coined “the permaweb”. This is an array of data, websites, and decentralised applications, to which anyone can contribute and maintain. This system provides an incentive to store your data without compromising your privacy, solving one of the key issues facing the current web. Sam Williams, Co-founder & CEO of Arweave, talks about the technical solution they have built, the economic model around endowment, and the ethical and philosophical questions the permanence of information against concepts like “the right to be forgotten” raises. Topics covered in this episode: - Sam’s background and how he got into the blockchain space - Breaking down BitTorrent – the first scalable decentraized file sharing system - Data sustainability on the web and what should be kept - Arweave under the hood and what is a blockweave - How data is stored and retrieved in blocks - Arweave’s economics and incentive model - Data replication within the infrastructure and ensuring decentralization in the future - The AR tokens and how the Arweave endowment works - Arweave vs Skynet vs IPFS - Does Arweave help with the data availability problem in Ethereum? - Arweave's business model - Community projects that Arweave are involved with and what’s next for the project Episode links:  - [Arweave website](https://www.arweave.org/) - [Welcome to the Permaweb](https://medium.com/@arweave/welcome-to-the-permaweb-ce0e6c73ddfb) - [Arweave Whitepaper](https://www.arweave.org/files/arweave-lightpaper.pdf) - [Arweave on Medium](https://medium.com/@arweave) - [Arweave Twitter](https://twitter.com/ArweaveTeam) - [Sam Williams Twitter](https://twitter.com/samecwilliams) - [Mainnet 2020 – Messari's Flagship Crypto Event (June 1 to 3)](https://mainnet.events) - [Free tickets to Web 3.0 Forum (June 8 to 10)](https://ti.to/cogx/cogx-2020/discount/TPDODSFP100) - [Casual meetup for friends of Epicenter](https://epicenter.rocks/virtualmeetup) Sponsors:  - ShapeShift: ShapeShift is the leading crypto platform offering zero-commission trading - https://shapeshift.com/ This episode is hosted by Sebastien Couture & Friederike Ernst. Show notes and listening options: [epicenter.tv/341](https://epicenter.tv/341