Dave Birch

The way that money works now is a blip. It's a temporary institutional arrangement agreed in response to specific political, technological and economic circumstances. As these circumstances change, so money must change. Many people think that it will undergo a pretty significant change in the very near future and we need to start planning for the coming era of digital currency. The historian Niall Ferguson wrote in 2019 that 'if America is smart, it will wake up and start competing for dominance in digital payments'. Competing for this new currency dominance could mean a new cold war in cyberspace with, for example, Facebook's private currency facing off against China's public currency facing off against a digital euro. Or would a digital dollar win this new space race? This is not just the concern of wide-eyed technologists obsessed with Bitcoin. In a 2019 speech the governor of the Bank of England said that a form of global digital currency could be 'the answer to the destabilising dominance of the US dollar in today s global monetary system'. But which digital currency? Will we really be choosing between the Federal Reserve and Microsoft (between dollar bills and Bill's dollars)? Or between Facebook's Libra and the Chinese Digital Currency/Electronic Payment system 'DC/EP'? Between spendable SDRs and Kardashian Kash? It would be a mistake to see this as a technical debate about cryptocurrencies and blockchains, about hash rates and key lengths. It matters far beyond the virtual boundaries of the new age. The dollar's dominance gives America the ability to exert soft power through the International Monetary and Financial System. A serious implication of replacing existing monetary arrangements with new infrastructure based on digital currency is that this power might be constrained. How might America respond to losing its hegemony?

Technology is changing money: it has been transformed from physical objects to intangible information. With the arrival of smart cards, mobile phones and Bitcoin it has become easier than ever to create new forms of money. Crucially, money is also inextricably connected with our identities. Your card or phone is a security device that can identify you – and link information about you to your money. To see where these developments might be taking us, David Birch looks back over the history of money, spanning thousands of years. He sees in the past, both recent and ancient, evidence for several possible futures. Looking further back to a world before cash and central banks, there were multiple ‘currencies’ operating at the level of communities, and the use of barter for transactions. Perhaps technology will take us back to the future, a future that began back in 1971, when money became a claim backed by reputation rather than by physical commodities of any kind. Since then, money has been bits. The author shows that these phenomena are not only possible in the future, but already upon us. We may well want to make transactions in Tesco points, Air Miles, Manchester United pounds, Microsoft dollars, Islamic e-gold or Cornish e-tin. The use of cash is already in decline, and is certain to vanish from polite society. The newest technologies will take money back to its origins: a substitute for memory, a record of mutual debt obligations within multiple overlapping communities. This time though, money will be smart. It will be money that reflects the values of the communities that produced it. Future money will know where it has been, who has been using it and what they have been using it for.