Here’s another way of looking at things. Bitcoins aren’t really money, they are a way of keeping score.
These are the personal opinions of Consult Hyperion and its guests and should not be misunderstood as representing the opinion of its clients or suppliers. To discuss how any of the technologies discussed in this post can benefit your business, please contact Consult Hyperion.
We are moving from money we understand to money that understands us. Man, I wish I’d said that.
These are the personal opinions of Consult Hyperion and its guests and should not be misunderstood as representing the opinion of its clients or suppliers. To discuss how any of the technologies discussed in this post can benefit your business, please contact Consult Hyperion.
Surely the ultimate proof that loyalty points are in fact a form of money is that people steal them.
These are the personal opinions of Consult Hyperion and its guests and should not be misunderstood as representing the opinion of its clients or suppliers. To discuss how any of the technologies discussed in this post can benefit your business, please contact Consult Hyperion.
To most people, words like cash, currency, money, moolah, credit, loot, greenbacks and shekels are interchangeable. But they mean different things. Would a future money media cheat sheet be helpful?
These are the personal opinions of Consult Hyperion and its guests and should not be misunderstood as representing the opinion of its clients or suppliers. To discuss how any of the technologies discussed in this post can benefit your business, please contact Consult Hyperion.
With my feet up and a cup of tea, I was relaxing reading David R. Warwick’s “The Case Against Cash” in the July edition of “The Futurist” magazine. He notes that of the $829 billion in US currency “in circulation”, two-thirds is outside the US. According to the Boston Fed, the average US consumer has only $79 about their person, with another $157 at home or in the office. Say $200 each for 200 million consumers, that comes to only $40 billion. Even if you calculate it at $300 each for 300m consumers, that’s still only $90 billion, which would imply that about two-thirds of the cash in the US in unaccounted for, a figure that tallies well with more detailed calculations made for some European countries. That means that if the US is as law-abiding as, say, Norway, then there’s about $200 billion of cash in the US that is only used for tax evasion, crime, money laundering and so on.
Mr. Warwick says that the biggest single benefit of the abolition of cash in the US will be the elimination of cash robberies, which costs the country about $140 billion per annum. This may be so, but personally, I think that the greatest benefit will be what he puts second on the list: financial inclusion. People trapped in a cash economy are not only discriminated against (because they pay the highest transactions costs) but they are cannot get on the financial services ladder. They have to take payday loans instead of bank loans, use cheque-cashing services and so on. Helping these people on to that ladder is a very positive outcome for the electronic payments industry (assuming that it can deliver the low-cost products that are needed to do this).
Naturally I sympathise with Mr. Warwick, but I don’t hold out much short term hope for the US getting rid of cash, although I can see that there are some interesting ways to make progress. A correspondent wrote, kindly, in response to a recent post I made about the role of e-payments in reducing cash evasion.
In addition to strict regulations that require POS technology to retain sales records (and criminal liability if they are found to be tampered), the Brazilian state of Sao Paulo created a program called “Nota Fiscal Paulista” which works by consumer demand. It encourages consumers to ask for their receipts, which pressures the business into declaring their sales taxes to the state tax collector. At year’s end the consumer gets a share of their taxes paid returned to them, as well as an entry in a larger lottery. I’ve had family members win sizeable pots simply for opting in to this receipt at check out.
Many merchants really dislike this scheme, presumably because it works, but they are obliged to offer it because of consumer pressure. There’s another similar scheme in Korea, whereby merchants who take more than some threshold (75%?) volume of their transactions electronically rather than in cash get a tax break. The government has presumably calculated that reducing tax evasion from cash sales more than makes up for the revenue reduction from the tax break. Perhaps in these straightened times the US tax authorities might begin to make similar calculations.
However, while the US may not be able to get rid of cash domestically — more’s the pity — it could at least start trying to get rid of cash in some other theatres. Perhaps a good place to start might be somewhere where, unlike America, there is a viable mobile phone-based alternative to cash: Afghanistan, where the M-PAISA scheme is up and running.
Electronic payments, if implemented properly, can bring transparency as well as efficiency. And transparency can have some unexpected consequences. Look what happened when the M-PESA service was launched in Afghanistan (as M-PAISA) and used to introduce efficiency into the process of salary payments for civil servants…
Another factor pointing to Afghanistan as the nexus for such an experiment is that the campaign against cash there may be able to co-opt a pretty powerful ally: the US military.
For the past few years the military has been striving to replace its cash transactions with electronic fund transfers and debit card payments in the hopes of achieving a “cashless battlefield,” in the words of Peter Kunkel, a former assistant secretary of the Army.
Right now, the battlefield is only cashless because all of the cash is being spirited away as soon as it arrives and (I’m sure) to no good purpose — as I heard our (former) man in Kabul Sherard Cowper-Coles pointing out on the BBC’s Start the Week programme recently — and there doesn’t seem to be any way to keep it in place.
Last month, a well-dressed Afghan man en route to Dubai was found carrying three briefcases stuffed with $3 million in U.S. currency and $2 million in Saudi currency, according to an American official who was present when the notes were counted. A few days later, the same man was back at the Kabul airport, en route to Dubai again, with about $5 million in U.S. and Saudi bank notes.
[From Officials puzzle over millions of dollars leaving Afghanistan by plane for Dubai]
I love the title of the article, don’t you? It doesn’t seem that much of a “puzzle” to me.
Cash declaration forms filed at Kabul International Airport and reviewed by The Washington Post show that Afghan passengers took more than $180 million to Dubai during a two-month period starting in July. If that rate held for the entire year, the amount of cash that left Afghanistan in 2009 would have far exceeded the country’s annual tax and other domestic revenue of about $875 million.
[From Officials puzzle over millions of dollars leaving Afghanistan by plane for Dubai]
There really ought to be more upset about the havoc that these billions of US dollars cause but not merely facilitating but actively encouraging corruption on such an enormous scale, yet even at the very highest levels there’s no sense (that I can find) of outrage. In fact, everyone (except taxpayers, presumably) seems quite happy with the seigniorage-powered status quo.
Karzai said cash transactions are quite normal and then-President George W. Bush was aware of the Iranian donations. The United States supposedly gives him bags of cash as well.
[From BlogPost – Karzai’s bags of cash a conundrum for the U.S.]
Interestingly, when he says “bags of cash” he isn’t speaking metaphorically: they actually do give him bags of cash, as do the Iranians apparently. I don’t think any of them are going to get behind my campaign to reduce the use of cash to the great benefit of society as a whole.
Suspicions of corruption in the Afghan government, with one cable alleging that vice president Zia Massoud was carrying $52m in cash when he was stopped during a visit to the United Arab Emirates.
[From US embassy cables leak sparks global diplomatic crisis | World news | The Guardian]
Not mobile phone top-up vouchers or open-loop prepaid cards or high-street vouchers, but FIFTY TWO MILLION GREENBACKS. That made me wonder about his baggage allowance. How much would $52m in weigh? Could you fit it in cabin luggage or would you have to check it? After all 520,000 $100 bills take up a fair bit of space. I seem to remember from a previous discussion, that a cereal box can hold $500,000 so we’re talking about 100 cereal boxes at least.
In reality, restricting ourselves to $100 bills, the maximum is only $450,000 (the New Jersey ne’erdowells didn’t pack optimally!).
I don’t think you could fit 100 cereal boxes in the two checked bags that you’re allowed on British Airways, but I suppose vice presidents are allowed a couple more. But back to the point, which is…
Why does the world need 1 billion $100 bills? Indeed, why does the U.S. continue to print C-notes at all?
Look, I’m not making any sort of political point about Afghanistan, I’m arguing this general point. The US should cease printing $50 and $100 bills immediately. They have no function in supporting commerce.
And it’s not just that carrying around cash is inconvenient and time consuming. These days, one of its main functions is to finance the black economy: drug deals, counterfeiting, under-the-table employment and other nefarious activities. Because cash is anonymous, people can easily opt out of the taxable economy – leaving the rest of us to pick up the tab for their use of public services. Remove cash entirely, and you make it far more difficult to avoid tax, not to mention discouraging criminal activity.
I written before about a current example of large amounts of cash making a problem (that no-one would claim is caused by cash) significantly worse.
Ransoms are paid in cash, partly because Somalia has no functioning banking system, and partly to hamper American anti-money-laundering investigators
I have to say that this piracy is looking more and more like a viable career option to me. It is very well remunerated and there appears to be much less chance of going to jail than in, say, investment banking or management consultancy.
Of the 650 Somali pirates caught since late 2008, 460 have already been released, according to Lloyd’s Market Association
[From Prime Numbers: The Pirate Den – By Bridget Coggins | Foreign Policy]
The English have a proud history of piracy, so I think I’d fit right in. Avast ye landlubbers!
These opinions are my own (I think) and presented solely in my capacity as an interested member of the general public [posted with ecto]
These are the personal opinions of Consult Hyperion and its guests and should not be misunderstood as representing the opinion of its clients or suppliers. To discuss how any of the technologies discussed in this post can benefit your business, please contact Consult Hyperion.
There’s a lot going on in the world of payments in Denmark, sparked in part by SEPA, but with other factors as well. Many people think only of Denmark in terms of its principal exports — such as bacon, Lego and sperm — but it means only one thing to me: Danmont, the first of the European smartcard-based e-purses to try and take on cash half a generation ago.
In a statement, PBS says Danmont has not been adopted by the Danes as a preferred way of making small payments… the debit card Dankort has taken over from Danmønt in areas where the e-purse was formerly used as a form of payment. The scheme will continue to operate until 31 December 2005.
Now everything is changing again, because the domestic debit scheme can no longer discriminate against “foreign” cards and there needs to be a new national payment strategy. This is why its such an interesting time there and why I was so delighted to be invited by the Copenhagen Finance IT Region, a “cluster organisation” with 13 partners including the Danish Bankers Association, to come and talk at their event looking at the future of money. I was invited along with Alberto Jiminez, the Mobile Payments Global Leader at IBM, and Roslyn Layton from KLEAN, a Danish consultancy. Alberto was talking about mobile, Roslyn was talking about the internet, and I was talking about mercantilism, Kublai Khan and Facebook Credits. Here we are in the Tivoli!
Alberto divided the world into developed (North America, Western Europe, South Korea, Japan, Australia and New Zealand) and developing payment markets, a simpler model than the “quadrants” that we use at Consult Hyperion. Anyway, he pointed out that in the developing countries where there are real opportunities only a handful (Kenya, Philippines, South Africa, Pakistan, Uganda) have reached scale, which he defined as being more than a million users. He explored the benefits of opening up mobile payment markets which, in the IBM model, fall into three categories: the revenue opportunities, cost savings and the “indirect” benefits. This last category — which includes social inclusion, government agendas, brand benefits and so on — I find really interesting, probably because it’s the least understood. He also mentioned government agendas, something that has come up in a few recent discussions that I’ve been involved in.
In her talk, Roslyn touched on one of my very favourite topics, which is the online games business and the growth of what she called “funny money”. But she was also taking about the permeable boundary between loyalty schemes and pseudo-currency. In particular, she drew attention to a Lufthansa “Miles & More’ scheme that lets you trade in your frequent flier miles for a cash management account (CMA) that can contain both securities and deposits. She also drew attention to the relative size of some markets: online games are a $15 billion business at the moment, sure, but premium SMS (as Tomi never tires of reminding me!) is a $23 billion business and online gambling is a $35 billion business. Great stuff. She finished up, though, by saying that we won’t go to an entirely virtual economy, because people ultimately want to keep their money in banks.
Well, up to a point. There’s a big difference between keeping money in the bank and keeping bank money, one of the points I tried to bring out it my discussion about the “ages of money” and the shifting implementation of the functions of money. I’ve included the slides below for anyone interested.
I think the main point that I was trying to get over was that while new technology means real change in payments, it also means real change in money itself. All in all, a really enjoyable event, where I learned a lot and had fun too. Many thanks to everyone involved.
These opinions are my own (I think) and presented solely in my capacity as an interested member of the general public [posted with ecto]
These are the personal opinions of Consult Hyperion and its guests and should not be misunderstood as representing the opinion of its clients or suppliers. To discuss how any of the technologies discussed in this post can benefit your business, please contact Consult Hyperion.
It was obvious a few years ago that not only were virtual worlds going to be big business, but that they would have an impact on the payments market. I used put things like World of Warcraft into product and service roadmap discussions for our clients in the financial services space, and I’m sure that they thought I was doing it just for fun, just to get some discussion going. But having played around in the space, I could see it would lead to some new thinking. When you’re sending World of Warcraft gold pieces to a friend in Asia via an elven intermediary (quicker and cheaper than banks, by the way) you can’t help but wonder at the “real world” instruments to hand. This from three years ago…
Well it wouldn’t surprise anyone then, that most of our partners report they have a completion rate of 0.5-1% when they present a credit card payment page to their users for virtual goods…Mobile on the other hand… takes 15 seconds, and off goes the user to his virtual good or points that will enhance his game or app experience immediately without ever leaving the environment of the app.
[From Virtual Goods / Currency and Mobile Payments: the business model for Social Apps]
Note that figure: one in a hundred transactions complete. People playing at being virtual farmers want to buy some virtual cows, so they click to buy, but when they see a credit card payment screen, they can’t be bothered. So there was a demand for a new kind of payment instrument that was not being met by the banks. Look how much things have changed since then, with the incredible boom in app store and in-game payments. There’s no doubt that the retail payments roadmap is indeed being affected by the world of games.
Now I’m not implying that it’s only payments will be impacted, because in the longer run it will be many kinds of financial service, including banking.
The publisher of the online science-fiction game “Entropia Universe,” set on the planet Calypso, received a banking license from the Swedish Financial Supervisory Authority last week and plans to open a real bank within a year, albeit one without physical, walk-in branches.
Players of “Entropia” already exchange real money for a virtual currency that is used for their expenses on Calypso. And virtual money they make in the game, through hunting, mining, trading or other activities, can be cashed out into real money. The virtual currency, Project Entropia Dollars, has a fixed 10-to-1 exchange rate to the U.S. dollar.
By setting up a real-world bank, Sweden-based publisher MindArk PE AB gains the protection of the Swedish government’s deposit insurance for these accounts, up to about $60,000 for each customer.
[From The Associated Press: Online game gets real-world banking license]
A healthy development! My younger son spends a lot of time online with his friends at the moment, hanging out not at the mall but at the WoW auction house (this is where he learns about economics, I’m happy to say). That’s where our clients’ next generation of customers are learning about money, payments and financial services. This from two years ago…
Today, Facebook application developers monetize their games and other applications by accepting payment directly using PayPal, Google, Amazon FPS, or SocialGold. Or developers may opt to receive direct payment via mobile phone via Zong, Boku, or another mobile payment provider… game developers in particular, often accept payment via a prepaid card sold in retail establishments, such as the Ultimate Game Card. The social and gaming web is exploding with virtual currency offerings, yet thus far no one model or payment brand dominates.
[From Purchasing Facebook Credits with Zong Mobile Payments — Payments Views from Glenbrook Partners]
Now, forward-looking organisations could see what was going on and began to target R&D appropriately.
Google is developing a micropayment platform that will be “available to both Google and non-Google properties within the next year,”… The system, an extension of Google Checkout, would be a new and unexpected option for the news industry as it considers how to charge for content online.
The idea was then that micropayments would be a payment vehicle available to both Google and non-Google properties within the year. The idea was to allow viable payments of a penny to several dollars by aggregating purchases across merchants and over time. Google planned to mitigate the risk of non-payment by assigning credit limits based on past purchasing behavior and having credit card instruments on file for those with higher credit limits and using proprietary risk engines to track abuse or fraud. Merchant integration through Checkout would be extremely simple. Google, in fact, subsequently decided to purchase an in-game payments company rather than build it themselves.
Facebook and Google are poised to challenge the banking industry in online payments.
[From Facebook and Google Encroach on Banks Turf – US Banker Article]
Is this really true? I think the answer is yes and no, in the sense that I can’t see any reason why Facebook or Google would want to be a bank, unless it’s to get some sort of government handout, but I can see why they might want to get involved in payments in order to make money (not from the payments, where margins are thin, but from new products and services that have payments integral to them). This is why the news that Facebook had also begun experimenting with a payment system was hardly unexpected, but was notable nonetheless. There was an expectation that the existence of a secure and convenient micropayment scheme for Facebook users (of which there now more than 600 million) would stimulate the development of a new marketplace within Facebook’s “barbed wire”. This seemed plausible to me — if it had been up to me, I would have added a spurious green element to the proposition somehow (getting merchants and other organisations to give out Facebook credits to reward environmentally desirable behaviour) — and I was sure it would do well. I wondered in a number of forums as to who else might enter this more competitive currency market?
In the coming months, facebook users will be able to obtain facebook Credits using MOL points purchased through MOL’s network of more than 500,000 outlets, which are mainly in Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, Philippines, Thailand, India, Australia and New Zealand. In addition to outlets such as 7-Eleven stores and cybercafes, customers will be able to purchase Credits through MOL’s network of online banks in these countries.
I gave a talk last year when I mentioned that I thought that Facebook credits would become the biggest virtual currency in the world fairly quickly. Unusually for my glib and sweeping predictions from the conference platform, this one appears to have come true, and even more quickly than I had imagined.
By the end of the year, Facebook expects that Credits will be used to buy the vast majority of virtual goods sold on Facebook. The fast-growing market is expected to reach $835 million on Facebook this year, according to the Inside Network… Through Credits, Facebook will take a 30 percent cut… To bolster that market, Facebook began selling Credits gift cards at Target stores across the country this month.
[From Facebook Promotes Its Credits as Path to Dollars – NYTimes.com]
Now this will one day become a standard business school case study. Talking of which, a few years ago, as part of a course I was teaching at Visa’s Bank Card Business School, a colleague and I mocked up a future Visa card that drew on a World of Warcraft account rather than a fiat currency account. This was photoshopped up to make a point, and at the time it was supposed to be a totally out-of-the-box crazy picture of the future. About two weeks after we made it up, I read that a US bank was issuing a Visa card with cashback in World of Warcraft gold. Oh well. It did help to make one of the points that I was trying to get across, which is that the future of payments will extend beyond the “traditional” bank, consumer, merchant and acquirer for 4-party model.
Vegetable company Green Giant is offering an unlikely reward for purchasing their products: virtual currency in Zynga’s hit social game FarmVille.
[From Wacky: Zynga Gives Away Free FarmVille Cash With Purchases Of Real Life Vegetables]
That was bad timing, coming just as Zynga (the people behind Farmville) caved in to Facebook and agreed to replace Farmville cash with Facebook credits, but it was an interesting development nonetheless, showing that virtual money is just as valuable as “real” money. Facebook’s tactics show they undoubtedly have a strategy in this field.
First Facebook turned off notifications for applications, taking away the primary mechanism for social games to go viral. Now if a company wants a massive audience for a new game, they almost certainly have to buy it through Facebook advertising.
Now Facebook is rolling out Credits as the preferred method of payment for games on their Platform, and taking a 30 per cent cut of the transactions. That’s a much larger percentage than the social games companies were handing over to the small payment companies that had sprung up to fill this niche, and higher than the fees charged by PayPal and credit card companies.
[From Zynga says it’s not leaving Facebook | Tech Blog | FT.com]
Now there’s something to be said for the creation of a single currency area as a way to encourage trade and therefore prosperity.
Besides leading the creation of a more people-centric web, it could also end up having the dominant virtual currency, according to an early adopter of Facebook Credits. PopCap Games has been using the service, which is still in the beta testing phase, as the sole payment method for Bejeweled Blitz on Facebook.
The game is free to play and attracts 11m monthly players, 3m of them playing it daily. PopCap sells extra power-ups, which boost players’ capabilities, and is moving onto sales of virtual items. It has decided to ignore offering other virtual currency options and only accepts Facebook Credits. Users can buy them with credit cards, Paypal or through their mobile phones in $5, $10 and $20 increments for 50, 100 or 200 Credits.
[From Facebook’s Credits Bank of the Web | Tech Blog | FT.com]
These are all useful case studies, showing how a new currency can develop and evolve.
Facebook has certainly tried to guide the development of its online economy, almost in the way that governments seek to influence economic activity in the real world, through fiscal and monetary policy. Earlier this year the firm said it wanted applications running on its platform to accept its virtual currency, known as Facebook Credits. It argued that this was in the interests of Facebook users, who would no longer have to use different online currencies for different applications.
[From Social networks and statehood | The future is another country | Economist.com]
I think I’ve seen the playbook before.
That means all Facebook game developers will be able to start using Credits as their payment system for virtual goods — in fact, Facebook is requiring them to make the switch by July
[From All Facebook Games Will Have To Use Facebook Credits Starting In July]
This comes from the Great Khan’s playbook for monetary and fiscal policy. Not Genghis Khan. His fiscal policy was confused: when he took control of China in 1215, his pacification plan was to kill everyone in China, no small undertaking since China was then, as now, the world’s most populous country. Fortunately, one of his advisors, a man who ought to be the patron saint of Finance Ministers everywhere, Yeliu Ch’uts’ai, pointed out (presumably via a primitive Treasury model of some sort) that dead peasants paid considerably less tax than live ones, and the plan was halted. In 1260, Genghis’ grandson Kublai Khan became Emporer of China. He decided, much as Mark Zuckerberg has, that it was a burden to commerce and taxation to have all sorts of currencies in use, ranging from copper “cash” to iron bars, to pearls to salt to specie, so he decided to implement a paper currency.
Here’s what Marco Polo had to say about it…
His monetary policy was refreshingly straightforward and more robust, even, than Mr. Zukerberg’s: if you didn’t accept his money, he would kill you. Naturally, in a short time, the new single currency was established and paper money began to circulate instead of gold, jewels, copper coins and metal bars. If you think talking about a new currency is crazy, take a look at Facebook Deals. According to Facebook, at launch, you will not be able to buy physical goods with Facebook Credits. Rather you will be able to get things like vouchers that you can redeem at events: now this is, frankly, a paper-thin distinction. I can’t use Facebook Credits to pay for, say, a Coke at a pop concert but I can use them to pay for a voucher for a Coke at a pop concert. I am not an economist, but…
When beloved national retailers start offering goods and lower prices to customers who pay with a new, virtual currency – that’s when said virtual currency becomes a force to reckon with. Somebody call Congress and the Federal Reserve – it’s time to start having some serious conversations.
[From Facebook Deals Launches Tonight & Groupon Doesn’t Stand a Chance (Updated)]
There’s a warning from history here! Unfortunately, the Khan’s paper money ended in disaster because the money supply was not managed: it collapsed in hyperinflation, because in the days after Yeliu Ch’uts’ai, the temptation to print money was just too great for the monetary authorities too resist. Let’s hope that the Emperor of Facebook finds an advisor of the calibre of Yeliu Ch’uts’ai.
One possible future might be that, just as China turned in on itself and stagnated, leaving technological and commercial progress to other people, Facebook will become an inward-looking economy while others take up the torch! Perhaps competition in currency, not only in payment methods, is need to keep an economic space vital.
The new program, announced today at SXSW, is called RewardVille, which will give players zPoints and zCoins in CityVille, FrontierVille, FarmVille, Mafia Wars, Zynga Poker, Café World, Treasure Isle, YoVille, PetVille and Vampire Wars.
Competition. This is the American way, not going complaining to Senator Durbin.
These opinions are my own (I think) and presented solely in my capacity as an interested member of the general public [posted with ecto]
These are the personal opinions of Consult Hyperion and its guests and should not be misunderstood as representing the opinion of its clients or suppliers. To discuss how any of the technologies discussed in this post can benefit your business, please contact Consult Hyperion.
A few years ago, I was thinking about how to relate the changing technology of money to changes in money, and I thought it would be useful to have some rough categorisation to organise thoughts. At the time, I wrote this:
The era of Money 3.0 is just beginning. Its central dynamic is no longer connectivity (since everything is connected to everything else) but community.
[From Digital Money: Money 3.0]
After a while, I realised that my initial categorisation was insufficiently granular to organise all of the thoughts I had on the topic and all of the information I had gathered on the topic. (I’m thinking of writing a book about it, which is why I have been gathering a lot of material on the specific topic of the technology of money.) A little while ago I posted a more sophisticated idea for a categorisation of the ages of money, or money eras. This extended the framework from three to five “eras”.
Our current era, Money 4.0, can be dated in retrospect to 1971 when Richard Nixon finally ended the gold standard and Visa introduced the Base 1 network for authenticating card payments based on the magnetic stripe. Money 4.0 is bits about bits, but we still apply the wrong mental model, and imagine it to be bits about atoms.
[From Digital Money: Another go at categorising money technologies]
This led me to describe the future as a new age of money, Money 5.0 I suppose, where the abstraction becomes complete and there are wholly new kinds of money that are not based on debt (or, indeed, anything else ultimately tangible) or secured in some conventional way but on relationships. Having had a bit of feedback on this, I think it serves its purpose. Obviously, some aspects are a little arbitrary — starting the information revolution in 1871 — but I think I can support the dating of the communications revolution to 1971, since this is roughly when company size peaked in the UK (actually it was in 1973), and anyway it fits nicely with the narrative of the 100 year interlude that I contend still constrains our mental models of what money is and how it works.
This categorisation leads me to think that we should be looking for Money 5.0 where we see private bits, not bits about anything, becoming a means of exchange. Why private bits? Well, at this year’s Digital Money Forum, we had a wonderful session on private currency, chaired by the economist Diane Coyle.
This morning I had the privilege of chairing a fascinating session at the Digital Money Forum run each year by Dave Birch of Consult Hyperion. The speakers were Professor George Selgin of the University of Georgia, and James Turk of the Gold Money Foundation. Both were arguing, from different perspectives, for private money as a competitor to government money.
[From The Enlightened Economist :: Good money, digital or analogue]
George gave a superb talk on the way in which the industrial revolution in England was hampered by a lack of circulating means of exchange, so private companies stepped in to develop new forms of industrial means of exchange (copper tokens) that help commerce and trade to grow to the great benefit of the nation. It strikes me that we are now in a similar position: we have had the post-industrial revolution but we are still using industrial money and it is holding us back. This is why the virtual empires, such as Facebook, have gone on to produce wholly private currencies — everything from the Everquest Platinum Pieces of old to the Facebook Credits of today — just as the giants of the industrial revolution (eg, Boulton’s Factory) did 200 years ago. If you think that sounds fanciful, remember that the wholly virtual economy — that has no industrial analogue — is already of significant size and growing strongly.
more than 100,000 people in countries such as China and India earn a living by performing ‘micro-tasks’ in the virtual economy. Jobs include categorising products in online shops, moderating content posted to social media sites, or even playing online games on behalf of wealthier players who are too busy to tend to their characters themselves.
[From Finextra: Three billion dollar virtual economy to fuel developed world – World Bank]
As the World Bank report notes, this economy is already worth several billion dollars. With better money, it could be worth several billion more.
These opinions are my own (I think) and presented solely in my capacity as an interested member of the general public [posted with ecto]
These are the personal opinions of Consult Hyperion and its guests and should not be misunderstood as representing the opinion of its clients or suppliers. To discuss how any of the technologies discussed in this post can benefit your business, please contact Consult Hyperion.
What would a rational US policy on the circulating medium of exchange look like? What notes and coins should be in circulation? I think it’s time to start thinking about narrowing the range in order to reduce costs (and increase convenience).
One obvious way to reduce costs would be to follow countries including Australia and Canada and in replacing paper banknotes with plastic (polymer) banknotes. In a paper on this called “Production Costs, Seigniorage and Counterfeiting: Central Banks’ Incentives for Improving their Banknote Technology” from October last year, Forum friend Leo van Hove, together with co-authors Bouhdaoui and Bounie, calculates that the adoption of such notes would entail a drop in seigniorage revenue of roughly 0.1% (because of higher initial production costs) but would halve the annual replacement costs for banknotes, resulting in net savings of $374m per annum.
Using data from 1998, they find that the biggest cost saving would come from moving to a plastic $20, whereas the replacement of the $100 bill only becomes profitable after accounting for counterfeiting because without the reduction in counterfeiting the decrease in seigniorage revenue exceeds the savings in replacement costs. It’s easy to see why: $100 bills are not used to support commerce, so they don’t circulate in the US (I’m sure the majority are outside the US and will never be repatriated) and therefore don’t get worn and returned for replacement, whereas $20s are still used in retail.
In fact, I’ve noticed that more and more places in the US will no longer accept bills greater than $20 anyway, so if the US government could be persuaded to give up the seigniorage income from the $100 (in return for much reduced tax evasion and such like) then it would surely be sensible to move the $5, $10 and $20 to plastic and abolish the $50 and $100.
The $1 is another case entirely. The US is crazy to continue producing $1 bills as well as pennies that cost nearly two cents to make. I say scrap both. Give up on the penny and make the $1 coin work (which it would do if there were a deadline for withdrawing the bills). Leo and the chaps note that the “golden dollar” coin costs six times more to produce than the $1 bill (but lasts 14 times longer) ). If the government were to completely replace the $1 bill with the coin then it would save $116m per annum. This is interestingly slightly less than the estimate of $119m per annum it would save by going to plastic $1 bills.
The coin still makes more sense. Personally, I would much prefer to use a contactless card or mobile phone in the luggage cart machine at the airport, at the parking meter and in the Coke machine then mess about with coins or bills, but at least coins work in vending machines whereas bills drive you crazy being rejected again and again. I did notice, though, that the airport cart people have found an imaginative alternative solution: now they charge $4 instead of coins they take cards…
Maybe we need a new, technology-neutral Durbin-like amendement to reduce the cost of payments in the US, but this time one that doesn’t discriminate in favour of cash at the expense of more efficient alternatives and imposes cost-reduction targets on the currency. Incidentally, just to show how up-to-date I am with my finger on the pulse of money, after typing in the above, I settled down and found myself reading this…
In American, the questions are still more pressing, involving the return to specie payments, the future regulation of paper currency, its partial replacement by coin, and the exact size and character of the American dollar.
What hip and trendy blog did I find this on? Actually, it’s from “Money and the Mechanism of Exchange” by William Stanley Jevons, published in 1875. Money’s a conservative topic.
These are the personal opinions of Consult Hyperion and its guests and should not be misunderstood as representing the opinion of its clients or suppliers. To discuss how any of the technologies discussed in this post can benefit your business, please contact Consult Hyperion.
The idea of the talk is to reflect on the impact of technology on the various functions of money: that is, as a unit of account, mechanism for exchange, store of value and means of deferred payment. We tend to jumble these functions together, but if we want to understand how money might develop in the future, we need to pull them apart and then look at what technology might do to each of them. I’ll therefore look at how the evolution technology has changed these in the past, leading to the evolution of money.
For the purposes of the talk, I will having another go at categorising money technologies, this time by dividing the evolution of the technology of money into four eras:
Money 1.0 was atoms: grain, gold, stone discs, wampun, whatever. Guildford had a mint making silver pennies (the only coin of the day) by the time Edward the Martyr (975-979) so I like to think that at Consult Hyperion we are part of a tradition of new money technology by the River Wey!
Money 2.0 was atoms about atoms. From the tally sticks of Norman England to the private “tokens” (ie, coins worth more than their base metal content), these items were convenient than the commodities they represented.
Money 3.0 was bits about atoms: that is, fiat currency banknotes, electronic transfers and accounts. Once these bits could move faster than a galloping horse, our relationship with money changed.
Our current era, Money 4.0, can be dated in retrospect to 1971 when Richard Nixon finally ended the gold standard and Visa introduced the Base 1 network for authenticating card payments based on the magnetic stripe. Money 4.0 is bits about bits, but we still apply the wrong mental model, and imagine it to be bits about atoms.
So what does this mean for the future? Well, we can look at three distinct sources of pressure for change:
The first of all there are the technology pressures. These are actually the easiest to understand, at least in the short to medium term. All of the technologies that will impact the world of money, payments and banking over the next generation already exist, it’s just a question of looking around the world to see which of them will have disruptive impact. We don’t need to look much beyond the mobile phone to understand the key platform, since the mobile phone (or, I suppose, more properly, the device formerly known as the mobile phone) will be the most disruptive technology across many sectors. The addition of the short range, zero configuration, medium-speed wireless Near Field Communication (NFC) interface to the mobile handset changes the handset from being the very edge of the network to a pivot between local and global environments that it can integrate in a secure uncontrolled way. A credit card replaces cash if you want to pay a shop, the mobile phone replaces cash if you want to get paid.
Next there are the business pressures. It’s interesting to reflect within the UK, cash accounts for less than 3% of the “money” in use but still accounts for nearly 2/3 of retail transactions by volume, which makes for cost, cost, cost. And when it comes to the dynamic new channels for online business, we’ve got by shoehorning the cards and so forth into the new technology, but we haven’t yet seen the new money for the Internet emerge: perhaps Facebook Credits will take over! Over the coming generation, the payment business and the banking business will become more distinct and as a result more dynamic and efficient payment businesses will find new ways to replace cash. Cheque clearing is scheduled to end in the UK in 2018, so Internet and mobile phone-based alternatives will need to be operational fairly soon.
Finally and most importantly, there are the social pressures. Right now, the retail payments sector is a deadweight of around half a percent of GDP (in Europe). This is largely due to the continuing high use of cash and cheques rather than more efficient electronic alternatives. Clearly, replacing cash would reduce this total social cost and make the economy more efficient but this by itself won’t be enough to trigger action. However, there are growing pressures for governments to reduce the use of cash because it is used to facilitate crime and tax evasion more than because it is inefficient. In if we just focus on Europe we can see that these pressures take different forms in different regions. There are streets in Amsterdam but no longer take cash because the city council has subsidised the retailers electronic terminals in order to reduce crime and lower the costs for smaller retailers. In Sweden, a broad alliance of retail and banking trade unions wants to see the use of cash reduced in order to protect their staff. Post-crunch, these pressures will grow as governments and citizens alike demand action. And since no-one other than tax evaders or drug dealers actually wants the stuff, perhaps change will be quicker than many people think.
I’ll be reflecting on these issues, and more, in my talk and looking forward to being put on the spot in an informed question and answer session afterwards.
These opinions are my own (I think) and presented solely in my capacity as an interested member of the general public [posted with ecto]
These are the personal opinions of Consult Hyperion and its guests and should not be misunderstood as representing the opinion of its clients or suppliers. To discuss how any of the technologies discussed in this post can benefit your business, please contact Consult Hyperion.
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