Dennis Rodman: Cryptocurrency Ambassador

Last week, Dennis Rodman once again entered the media spotlight by taking a trip to North Korea. In spite of the media hullabaloo over the alleged purpose of Dennis Rodman’s latest round of basketball diplomacy, and apparent subsequent disappointment over the lack of controversy following the trip, the controversial star’s intent seems patently obvious: he is America’s cryptocurrency ambassador.

Media photographs of Rodman consistently pictured him decked out in gear emblazoned with the logo of his sponsor, PotCoin.com. Potcoin.com touts itself as “an ultra-secure digital cryptocurrency, network and banking solution for the $100 billion global legal marijuana industry,”—so Bitcoin, but marketed for pot entrepreneurs. The video embedded in the center of its homepage—which I could not help but to transcribe below—explains it all:

Image courtesy of BTC Keychain (https://www.flickr.com/photos/btckeychain/20401933105)

“Potcoins are digital coins you could send through the Internet. Potcoins have a number of advantages. Potcoins are transferred directly from person to person via the Net. This means that the fees are much lower. You can use them in every country. Your account cannot be frozen and there are no prerequisites or arbitrary limits [so you can pay for as much pot as you want in a single transaction].

“Let’s look at how it works. Your Potcoins are kept in your digital wallet on your computer or mobile device. Sending Potcoins is as simple as sending an e-mail and you can purchase anything with Potcoin [the possibilities!!!]. The Potcoin network is secured by thousands of computers using state of the art encryption. Anyone can join the Potcoin network and the software is completely open source so anyone can review the code. Potcoin opens up a whole new platform for innovation.

“Potcoin is changing finance the same way the Web changed publishing. When everyone has access to a global market, great ideas flourish [insert marijuana joke here]!”

In summary, because Potcoin appears to be Bitcoin for pot and also for things other than pot, it is effectively yet another cryptocurrency alternative to Bitcoin. Indeed, after watching this video, I found an eerily similar one on the homepage of bitcoin.org, with the word “pot” replaced by the word “bit.” In other words, the Potcoin video is a rehash (pun absolutely intended).

Earlier this month, I attended Northwestern University’s annual Internet Commerce and Innovation Conference, where Hanna Halaburda and Gur Huberman, economists who know quite a bit more than the average person on this topic, kindly explained how cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin actually work.

I will keep the explanation at a bird’s eye view level, but a more in-depth discussion is available on Scott Driscoll’s blog post entitled, “How Bitcoin Works Under the Hood,” and the paper by Satoshi Nakamoto, “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronics Cash System,” available at bitcoin.org. Hanna Halaburda has also written a book on the topic: “Beyond Bitcoin: The Economics of Digital Currencies.”

Transactions: Suppose that a Bitcoin user, call him Scottie, in possession of a Michael Jordan Hand Signed 50th Anniversary Basketball, is willing to accept a single Bitcoin from existing Bitcoin user, Dennis, who happens to have precisely one Bitcoin (around $2,500 at the time of this writing) in his possession. Any cheaper than that and Dennis may as well steal the ball. As Bitcoin users, both Scottie and Dennis have installed Bitcoin wallet software that allows them to facilitate the transaction.

Upon first usage, the wallet software on both users’ devices downloads a record of every Bitcoin transaction by everyone ever made. This record, called the Blockchain, represents a complete history of incremental groups of completed transactions, referred to as blocks. The Blockchain takes the place of a public ledger for Bitcoin. To undertake the transaction, Dennis must provide a digital signature to authenticate that he is in possession of and can transact Bitcoins. In addition to having a private component only available to Dennis, it contains a public component that reveals that Dennis can undertake the transaction and allows him to have the transaction recorded in the Blockchain. Once the transaction is verified by other Bitcoin users (more on these below), it is added to the ever growing Blockchain.

Verification: Here is where it gets weird: groups of transactions directing transfers of Bitcoins entail a public broadcast of these transactions interlinked with a mathematical puzzle that is, as I understand it, too complex to solve by any means other than computer driven guess work. Users, called miners, compete against each other to solve problems associated with each transaction. The first miner to solve the puzzle associated with a group of transactions gets to add that group to the Blockchain, thus expanding the history of transactions and enabling the transfer of Bitcoins. The miner is rewarded with Bitcoins—which is how new Bitcoins come into being—and earns the right to charge a transaction fee for verifying a group of transactions (more on this in the abovementioned references). If the transaction between Scottie and Dennis belongs to that particular group, the financial component of their transaction is completed (with some caveats left out) and Scottie can ship the ball to Dennis. However, as I indicate below, Scottie might wish to smoke two joints while he waits for a few additional blocks to be added to the chain before shipping the ball (though I make no personal recommendation as to what Scottie should actually do with his time while he waits).

Fraud: As described, the transaction verification process does not involve a centralized authority such as a bank. This leaves potential room for fraud as follows. If Dennis were a character of ill repute, he might wish to set up an additional transaction sending his one Bitcoin to an alternative account that he possesses. If that transaction is verified prior to his transaction with Scottie, Scottie’s transaction is considered nullified, but this will not be discovered until an attempt is made to add the transaction to the Blockchain. If Scottie, worried that the ball would deflate if not sent in time, sends it before the transaction with Dennis is added to the Blockchain, he would have no recourse unless he personally knows Dennis and can verify the terms of the transaction to a centralized authority. Moreover, even if Scottie could verify these terms, he might learn that Dennis lives in some place like North Korea, which might not offer him any recourse.

Alternatively, Scottie might view a new block being added to the Blockchain as sufficient time before sending the basketball. But then he risks that Dennis might execute and verify (by mining) additional fraudulent transactions on top of his now fraudulent block to extend the fraudulent chain before others solve sufficient puzzles to extend the true chain sufficiently far to actuate public agreement stipulating that the true chain is indeed the correct representation of the full Blockchain. This is not particularly likely unless Dennis has sufficient computing power to outcompete all active miners until Scottie sends him the ball. Thus far, I have made a stab at explaining buyer side fraud, but sellers with no reputation may be fraudsters as well, and it is less clear to me how to resolve concerns over seller side fraud. I found a rather creative suggested solution on an archived Reddit post requiring a buyer to confirm receipt before a seller can access the Bitcoins sent by the buyer, but also preventing the buyer from any further access to the Bitcoins once she has undertaken the transaction (sent the Bitcoins).

Disclaimer: Here I have only touched upon the bare bones of Bitcoin, but missing from this blog post is a slew of mathematics, economics, and practicalities. For those interested, I advise you to consult one or more of the readings above or to talk to an actual expert on the subject. I do not condone the use of any illicit substance and do not recommend the abuse or misuse of any mind or mood altering drug, whether illicit or not. I am, however, a vocal advocate and frequent user of double entendre.

Primary takeaways

Digital inequality shows larger impacts on youth academic performance as compared to time spent on screens.
Digital skills play a significant role in mediating unstructured online engagement (social media use, playing video games, browsing the web) and youth academic, social, and psychosocial development.
Unstructured online engagement and face-to-face social interaction are complementary and continuously interact to create and enhance youth capital outcomes.

A familiar story: concerns of screen time

Today’s discussions of adolescent well-being have coalesced around a clear narrative: teenagers spend too much time online, and their academic performance, mental health, and social lives are deteriorating as a result. A steady stream of academic papers, books, and op-eds, alongside a growing number of policy proposals––school phone bans, age-gated social media use, restrictive screen-time limits––rest on the same underlying claim, aligning with a contemporary, digitized version of the displacement hypothesis:

Screen time, particularly the unstructured, free-time spent on social media, gaming, watching video content, or browsing the web, is said to displace the productive face-to-face activities that build adolescents into capable adults.

The implied and often practiced solution is restriction. In response, this dissertation tested this claim directly, and placed it within the broader context of adolescence.

Across three years, I followed 653 Michigan adolescents from early through late adolescence: in grades 8 or 9 (survey one, 2019) to grades 11 or 12 (survey two, 2022). Notably, these students, studied over time, were part of a broader pooled sample of 5,825 students across the same eighteen highschools. The study window captured the year before and the year after the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic and related lockdown orders, functioning as an unprecedented stress test for theories of adolescent social, academic, and digital life and, importantly, as a benchmark to compare the effects of pandemic-related change and inequality to those effects from screen time alone.

Across four studies of adolescents, consisting of six cross-sectional and longitudinal analyses, findings are not consistent with the displacement narrative, nor the broader concerns about the time youth spend on screens.

Findings are, however, consistent with something the current public and (most) academic discussions have largely overlooked or ignored: the gaps and inequalities that determine whether adolescents can access and use the internet meaningfully in the first place.

What the displacement hypothesis overlooks

Displacement and related research and policy concerning the time young people spend online assumes a “zero-sum” model of adolescent day-to-day time. An hour online is an hour not spent studying, reading, sleeping, or interacting face-to-face (i.e., time spent on more productive or developmentally “better” activity).

Indeed, this makes sense logically. However, as an empirical claim, this model requires time spent online to behave differently from all other ways adolescents allocate time; it must produce uniquely negative outcomes and be inherently harmful across digital contexts, rather than the typical mix of trade-offs corresponding to, and often overlooked among any other social or developmental context.

Yet, online time does not differ from other youth activity. Instead, I find it has a mix of pros, cons, and even some “uniquely digital” benefits which youth utilize for social and academic gains. When I compared unstructured digital media use against traditional face-to-face interaction and activities, both produced similar patterns: some negative associations with academic outcomes, some null, and some positive.

Trade-offs within traditional face-to-face activity (for example, social time with friends and family, or time spent in after-school extracurriculars) are treated as ordinary developmental experiences that must be experienced for the betterment of development. The identical trade-offs involving digital time tend to be overlooked or ignored, and online engagement is perceived as altogether harmful.

A growing body of evidence, including this dissertation, do not support that distinction. Indeed, the developmental context is routinely misread, leaving out the context of the experiences and time spent on digital, as well as face-to-face activities, interactions, existing inequalities, and changes inherent to development. As such, I proposed a novel framework to understand these contexts:

Digital capital exchange

Rather than treating screen time as a unified harm, this dissertation advances an “exchange”-based framework, grounded in James Coleman’s theories of youth capital and digital inequality scholarship, particularly following Eszter Hargittai, Jan van Dijk, and Alexander van Deursen (see this list of all dissertation references for full works).

The core proposition is that adolescents’ online engagement is not an alternative to developmental activity but another, albiet modern domain through which young people accumulate and mobilize online resources––particularly digital skills––that work alongside existing social networks and experiences to be exchanged for human capital (measured as: academic achievement, aspirations, STEM interest) and social capital (peer networks, community participation, extracurricular involvement).

Online time is not the mechanism; instead, it is digital skills that I find to be the most vital component in youth capital exchange and enhancement. Unstructured online engagement contributes to online skills; those skills, accumulated and mobilized alongside existing peer, family, and community networks, translate into the outcomes researchers and parents care about, i.e., academic achievement, aspirations, and face-to-face interaction and social networks.

This digital capital framework treats online and in-person contexts as complementary rather than antagonistic, and it situates adolescents’ digital lives within the structural conditions––connectivity quality, device reliability, autonomy of use––that determine whether exchange can occur at all.

Methods (in brief)

Paper-and-pencil surveys were administered to students in classrooms at two time-points: spring 2019 (N=2,876) and spring 2022 (N=2,949), across the same eighteen predominantly rural Michigan schools, grades 8–12. Official, nationally-ranked standardized reading, writing, and math test scores (PSAT 8/9, PSAT 10, SAT; College Board) were then anonymously linked to students’ survey responses with the help of participating districts.

Cross-sectional path analyses modeled pooled and wave-specific samples (pooled N=5,825); two-wave cross-lagged panel models tested reciprocal, longitudinal relationships on the 653 students who completed both surveys. Multi-group analyses of the cross-lagged panel models compared relationships between girls (N=345) and boys (N=308). All longitudinal models included time-invariant socioeconomic covariates as well as time-varying covariates to reduce omitted-variable bias.

Key findings: an overview

To summarize, to the best of my ability, eight chapters across 376 pages, I present two primary findings:

First: digital inequality predicted larger and more consistent declines in human capital than screen time did.

Unreliable home internet and technology maintenance problems––experiencing and/or dealing with broken or outdated devices and software, restrictive school-issued hardware, issues with connecting to or maintaining internet access––decreased youth GPA and standardized test achievement. And, these effect sizes were substantially larger than any negative direct effect from unstructured digital media use.

Across all four empirical studies, digital inequality emerged as the most substantial predictor of academic and developmental decline.

Second: digital skills mediated the relationship between online time and adolescent academic and social outcomes.

Unstructured digital media use, particularly online gaming and web browsing, predicted higher internet and social media skills for adolescents, which in turn predicted stronger academic achievement and self-efficacy (human capital), and social interaction and extracurricular participation (social capital). The positive indirect effect of screen time through skills offset or exceeded any small negative direct effects across several outcomes (supporting our existing peer-reviewed work: Hales & Hampton, 2025, and which you can read more about here).

These exchange processes were amplified when peer and family networks were modeled alongside digital skills, consistent with the premise that online and offline contexts operate together rather than in competition. The effect was not universal: social media skills amplified rather than offset a negative association with consistency of interest, one of the two subscales of grit. The exchange framework describes a contextual and conditional, domain-specific mechanism, not a blanket defense of time spent online.

Implications

If digital inequality, and not screen time, is the primary predictor of adolescent academic and developmental decline, and still warrants concern regarding access quality and experience even with the broader adoption of digital devices across the United States, the current policy emphasis on restriction is pointed at the wrong target. The evidence supports a different set of priorities.

Stable, reliable home (fast) broadband should be treated as an educational prerequisite rather than a consumer amenity. Unreliable connectivity exerted larger downward pressure on human capital than any measure of screen time, and that pressure intensified during the pandemic-era reliance on digital infrastructure. Technology maintenance, device repair, replacement, technical support, and the flexibility to install software and explore the web autonomously, matters as much as initial access, and school-issued devices that restrict autonomous use appear to hinder skill accumulation rather than support it.

Restrictive parental mediation of internet use was negatively associated with grit and self-efficacy at magnitudes comparable to the positive contributions of face-to-face activity. This challenges the assumption that digital restriction functions protectively. Instructive mediation, teaching adolescents to verify information, navigate platforms critically, and mobilize online resources toward meaningful ends, is the posture the data supports.

Finally, the technical skill-building that occurs through gaming, self-directed exploration, and deep web use is skill-building, not wasted time. Closing the persistent gender gap in these domains likely requires legitimizing technical play for girls, rather than restricting it for everyone.

None of the above is an argument that screen time is benign. It is an argument that screen time is the wrong focus, particularly when studied mostly in isolation. Context matters substantially, whether that is time spent on other activities during adolescence, the period of adolescence itself, digital inequality, resources gained from such online use, and how all such factors interact. The factor that predicts whether a given adolescent can convert online engagement into capital outcomes is structural: access, infrastructure, skills, and the autonomy to use them. These factors are distributed unevenly, and its uneven distribution, not hours logged, is what separates adolescents who thrive from those who fall behind.

The full dissertation is available through Michigan State University’s ProQuest archive, or see the embedded full-text PDF below. I’m happy to share papers, preprints, or the underlying framework with anyone interested and working in this area––don’t hesitate to reach out via my contact form. Thanks for reading.

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Dennis Rodman: Cryptocurrency Ambassador