It is such a pleasure to sit down and talk to financial journalist Izabella Kaminska. She has one of the sharpest minds of her generation - and she doesn’t hold back once an opinion is formed. In more than 10 years at the Financial Times she put the “Alphaville” blog on the map. Izabella left the FT in 2022 to start her own project “The Blind Spot”. Recently she also joined Politico Europe as a Senior Finance Editor.
After covering it for over a decade, she sees Bitcoin as a “good challenger” to the legacy system, a “check on power” - and Izabella is very sceptical about CBDCs. She speculates that the “end of Dollar neutrality” could help Bitcoin find its role in the world: “There is no political class that doesn’t potentially benefit from Bitcoin, it could serve anybody.”
In this wide ranging conversation we taped in autumn 2022 she tells me how her views on Bitcoin and the world of digital fiat currencies evolved: “I realized Bitcoiners have a point when I saw the potential of government overreach during Covid. Until then I underestimated the importance of censorship resistance.”
Izabella has covered CBDCs “even before they were called CBDCs”. But what really sets her apart is her story as the daughter of Polish immigrants and her parents fate under Communism. Her father was even involved in moving “hard currency” from the UK to the homeland, then part of the Communist “Eastern Block”.
And yes, we do speculate if he would have been a Bitcoiner :)
All the best, Niko
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FTM6 with Izabella Kaminska: "It's good that Bitcoin is there for when you really need it"