Читать книгу Identity is the New Money - David Birch - Страница 6

Foreword

There was a moment early on in the financial crisis of 2008 when, according to the then Chancellor of the Exchequer, Alistair Darling, Britain’s banks came ‘within hours of shutting their cash machines down’. This was a vision designed to strike fear into the hearts of families around the country: what happens when the ATMs are switched off? Millions, surely, would starve! There would be riots! Society as we know it would come to an end!

The reality would almost certainly have been rather less apocalyptic. We know as much because it has happened before. In the 1960s and 70s, Ireland’s banks were shut for, in all, a year. Yes, it was messy and occasionally traumatic, but life went on. People came up with a whole range of alternatives, as they have done throughout history whenever financial or monetary chaos has stripped them of their currency or their financial system.

To point this out is not to downplay the difficulty of such moments, but to underline an important truth, which is fundamental to this book: money is a means, not an end. Yes, the notes and coins may be there in our hands; we occasionally exchange them with other people (though less and less these days); we often pay for items using our bank or credit cards. But the purpose of money in each case is to make a transaction; it’s simply the token which, over centuries, humans have used as a shorthand for proving that one person is willing to transfer a certain amount of wealth, time or earnings to another.

So when money, or the financial system that perpetuates its transfer, breaks down, the world does not end – we just come up with other tokens. Rightly, however, such moments give us pause for thought about whether the current system of economic transfer is really fit for purpose. The ATMs may not have stopped in 2008, the banks were bailed out and by many yardsticks remain as powerful and influential as before the crisis.

But, as Dave Birch shows in this thought-provoking book, advances in technology in recent years nonetheless promise to revolutionize the nature of money. After all, thanks to the Internet, we are living in a world of near-frictionless communication. It is possible for anyone to correspond, and hence transact, with almost anyone else. This has enormous consequences for the medium of that transaction – not to mention the question of how one proves one’s identity to those billions of potential people.

If you’re anything like me, by the time you’ve finished reading the book you’ll be wondering not just why we’re still exchanging copper, zinc and nickel coins with each other, but whether the days when a country can hold a monopoly over currency are coming to an end. Such questions are not, in and of themselves, new. And there is no mass cash-machine shutdown to force us into confronting them. However, there is a compelling case that technology may now have reached the stage when they are finally answerable.

Ed Conway

Economics Editor, Sky News