Copyright © 2014 David G. W. Birch
Published by London Publishing Partnership www.londonpublishingpartnership.co.uk
Published in association with Enlightenment Economics www.enlightenmenteconomics.com
All Rights Reserved
ISBN: 978-1-907994-35-7 (ebook)
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
This book has been composed in Candara
Copy-edited and typeset by T&T Productions Ltd, London www.tandtproductions.com
Cover art by Kate Prentice
This book is dedicated to the late Professor Glyn Davies, whose outstanding book A History of Money from Ancient Times to the Present Day and speech at the first ever Digital Money Forum in London in 1997 together formed the bedrock for my understanding of the relationship between money, monetary policy and technological change
Good name in man and woman, dear my lord,
Is the immediate jewel of their souls.
Who steals my purse steals trash; ’tis something, nothing;
’Twas mine, ’tis his, and has been slave to thousands;
But he that filches from me my good name
Robs me of that which not enriches him,
And makes me poor indeed.
William Shakespeare, Othello, Act 3, Scene 3, 155–161
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
Preface
While the immediate genesis of this book lay in a talk I gave to the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA) in London in 2011, the ideas it crystallizes go back much further. In 1997, along with my colleagues at Consult Hyperion, my work in the secure electronic transactions field had caused me to reflect on payments and identity management. I had come to the conclusion that there were some major changes underway and that we needed to explore the implications. The arrival of the world wide web and the mobile phone meant that the highly secure and efficient transactions systems that we had been working on for the Bank of England, the Stock Exchange, high street banks and even a proposed space mission would soon be available to the mass market. As my colleague Neil McEvoy pointed out at the time, the secure computers, costing tens of thousands of pounds, and secure data networks, costing millions of pounds, used to execute money market trades in the City of London could be replaced by free Internet Protocol (IP) connections and the €1 tamper-resistant microprocessors now seen on every credit and debit card, swapped between mobile phones and inside every ‘tap and go’ mass transit ticket.
I began to wonder what this significant technological advance in monetary transactions would mean. With the strong and unswerving support of my colleagues, I set about creating the Digital Money Forum and, subsequently, the Digital Identity Forum, in order to bring together a wide range of experts to explore the technological, business and social changes each year in London. It became clear that the two topics were converging and, in time, all of the events, blogs and podcasts were gradually merged into the Tomorrow’s Transactions thought-leadership blog, podcast, annual forum and ‘unconference’ series held in the United Kingdom and North America. The discussions, observations and reflections that stem from seventeen years of these forums, in the context of Consult Hyperion’s work for clients on secure electronic transactions around the world, form the core of this book and its central claim: the future of money is linked to the future of identity.
As time has gone by, I have become ever more convinced that we need to revise our understanding of what identity is and reformulate technical, business and, above all, social strategies for dealing with identity in the ‘new economy’. This book is an attempt to explain why. It also suggests one or two significant implications for policy makers and others.
My argument is, in short, that the new economy and new society that we are building on top of it demand a new way of thinking about identity, and a new way of thinking about money – and that the two converge.
Acknowledgements
It goes without saying that this book would not have been possible without Diane Coyle’s support and encouragement (for which I cannot thank her enough), the intelligence, experience (and patience) of my colleagues at Consult Hyperion and the support of my wife, Hara (and her tolerance of midnight word processing).
Chapter 1
Introduction
The chief principle of a well-regulated police state is this: That each person shall be at all times and places … recognised as this or that particular person.
Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1796)
What does ‘identity is the new money’ mean? My argument is that the nature of identity is changing. The concept of identity in today’s post-industrial society is profoundly