Money is often associated with greed and ruthless commercialisation. Seen in this light, as ‘Mammon’, it stands between us and what could otherwise be a rich connection to the social and natural world. Here at eFin & Demokratie, we have been exploring the Digitalgelddickicht with you for years now, and what we find there is not money itself, but payment infrastructures and technologies, a wide variety of services and stakeholders of all sizes, and a diverse range of national and international regulatory approaches. And we also find: utopias. Dreams of ‘better’ money – or even of how one might create an entirely new monetary system.
In this series of Digitalgelddickicht, we want to explore some of these utopias. We ask: How might we conceive of money differently? Who is already doing so? To what extent do digital technologies play a role in this – perhaps even a central one? And in this episode, we want to start with the very basics: actively helping to shape money? How? Who? And why?
Digitalgelddickicht Money Concepts – Do we need a different kind of money? Or different forms of money? (German only) | 22 October 2026
Guests
Ester Barinaga is a professor of social entrepreneurship at Lund University in Sweden. In 2024, she published Remaking Money for a Sustainable Future: Money Commons.
Friedemann Brenneis is a freelance journalist who focuses primarily on digital money and Bitcoin. He runs the blog https://www.coinspondent.de and is co-host of the Honigdachs podcast. In 2022, he was a Mercator Journalist in Residence at ZEVEDI, and in 2021 he edited *Magic Future Money: (Im)possible Stories of the Money of the Future.
Katharina Pistor is the Edwin B. Parker Professor of Comparative Law at Columbia University Law School in New York. In October 2025, she delivered the Adorno Lecture, entitled: ‘In Good Shape? On the Reorganisation of the Monetary System’.
Martijn Jeroen van der Linden is Professor of Practice in New Finance at The Hague University of Applied Sciences. Before moving into research, he worked at ING and in the NGO sector.