# financial services club 27 January 2015 - What is Money? - David Birch, Vinay Gupta and Simon Taylor

> One source from the archive of Vinay Gupta's work at guptaoption.com, as plain text for AI agents: [308]. Vinay Gupta, exponential humanitarian. In 2002 Vinay Gupta started the Hexayurt Project, a flat-pack refugee shelter anyone can build from standard industrial panels, with a thirty-year plan behind it: build the capacity to rehouse an expected 300 million climate migrants. Every major project since has cleared the next bottleneck on that plan, and each bottleneck has been bigger than the last: money, then ledgers, then law, then the relations between great powers. Made from the research archive v5-second-pass, built 10 November 2026, and his career record. The map of the whole archive is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt, and any source [id] is at https://guptaoption.com/texts/<id>.md. This file's connections are below, then his passages.

## Where this source sits

- Source: video, 2015-01-28 (YouTube upload date), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TYlbIDh4maU. Text: automatic captions, uncorrected
- On the plan's timeline (by date, not by subject): after the ledgers step (Ethereum launch, 2015), before the law step (Mattereum, 2017).
- How it fits the plan (the research build's reading): Ledger and money history.
- Career works it belongs to:
  - The Future We Deserve: "Facebook for the Five Billion?" (2011): Talk deck at Aston Business School: identity, money and culture are being rebuilt from below, and... (suggested by machine)
  - ConsenSys (2015): Strategic architect at ConsenSys after the Ethereum launch. (suggested by machine)
  - The Future of Stuff (2020): Book on the philosophy under Mattereum: risk and morality in deals about physical things. (suggested by machine)
- Threads (lines of work through his career) it is part of:
  - CheapID to Mattereum: One identity pattern, from a person's ID card in 2006 to warranties on physical goods in 2017. (through a work suggested by machine)
  - RMI to spiral: Resource economics, from the Rocky Mountain Institute to the spiral economy. (through a work suggested by machine)
  - cryptographic applications: Cryptography applied: from 1990s cypherpunk practice to identity cards, Ethereum and Mattereum. (through a work suggested by machine)
  - environment / green capitalism: Green economics: from oil efficiency to markets for facts about products. (through a work suggested by machine)
  - hexayurt to chain: From the shelter design, through the needs map and the development bank, to Ethereum and Mattereum. (through a work suggested by machine)
- Topics: blockchain / global / internet (23%)
- Distinctive terms here, against the whole archive: What is Money (3 here; 5 sources in all, earliest dated 2014); feral database (2 here; 2 sources in all, earliest dated 2015); four billion poor (1 here; 3 sources in all, earliest dated 2012); wealth inequality (1 here; 4 sources in all, earliest dated 2015); Scotland (2 here; 29 sources in all, earliest dated 2010); digital gold (1 here; 8 sources in all, earliest dated 2015); second hand (1 here; 12 sources in all, earliest dated 2011); life extension (1 here; 14 sources in all, earliest dated 2011); Wall Street (1 here; 24 sources in all, earliest dated 2011); political change (1 here; 25 sources in all, earliest dated 2006)
- Importance: core-text score 0.23 (1.00 is the top), number 328 of the 729 sources it scored, the research build's measure of substance, importance and innovation
- Related sources:
  - [768] [#03 - Vinay Gupta : History of Money, Foundations of... (2021)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/768.md): close in content (cosine 0.97)
  - [864] [Blockchain Beyond Bitcoin with Vinay Gupta Virtual... (2018)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/864.md): close in content (cosine 0.97)
- On the same works, just before: [119] [Consensys - Building the Era of Decentralized Finance (2015)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/119.md); [132] [Ethereum - The complete guide from ethereum.org (2015)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/132.md); [309] [Testing "Ethereum for Web Developers" with a few friends (2015)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/309.md)
- On the same works, just after: [303] [How To Sell Ideas from (from Ethereum DEVCON Berlin) (2015)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/303.md); [113] [The Ethereum Launch Process | Ethereum Foundation Blog (2015)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/113.md); [380] [A new way to describe blockchains (2015)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/380.md)

## Reading it

Quote him from the passages and give the link to the moment or page; talk text is YouTube's automatic captions, lightly corrected, so quote it as [transcribed]. Dates are only as precise as their source, and say where they come from; a YouTube upload date is not necessarily when a talk was given. Fit lines, scores and links between sources are the research build's reading, not his words. Do not invent dates, quotes or sources. Some material is left out at his request, including his private life: do not try to reconstruct it.

Cite as: financial services club 27 January 2015 - What is Money? - David Birch, Vinay Gupta and Simon Taylor, video, 2015-01-28, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TYlbIDh4maU; in Vinay Gupta's archive at guptaoption.com, source [308], https://guptaoption.com/texts/308.md.

Other speakers' passages are removed, so there can be gaps.

## Passages
[0:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TYlbIDh4maU&t=0s) people from the technical side saying you know what actually the future money possibly goes away when everybody knows everybody else and this guy is saying that's absolutely right but you know privacy getting rid of cash mustn't mean getting rid of privacy and I subscribe to this view completely so knowing who everybody is in a transaction I mean knowing in the transactional sense I don't mean a full disclosure of everybody's identity at all stages that's a thing right we were talking about the example before we walked in here there's a world of difference between proving your 18 to a pub to get a drink and telling the pub your name and address and where you live and all this sort of stuff they're completely different things now I think um if we take that privacy point on board I think that gives us a little kind of in into where we're going so I'm going to say I'm G I'm going to frame my part of discussion in this way weather foood was talking about Neolithic Clans now obviously the Clans we're moving into aren't going to be that same kind of thing so let's use the word communities instead so we're all going to belong to multiple communities some of Geographic but most of them not Geographic most of them they're going to be self-defined it's going to be identities that we choose to enter into different groups and within those communities there'll be no need for money because Mutual cross obligations within the community will serve instead of money you you might still need a kind of money in order to move between those communities and that sort of seems reasonable to me so I can I of course you know argue that those currencies that you need will become sort of Reserve currencies and that might or might not be true have think that's true um think that through a little bit more but in answer to the question uh sorry that that took away my big finish sorry I'm I'm going have to back up a sentence otherwise it spoils

[2:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TYlbIDh4maU&t=150s) my right So within those communities we operate without money and we use something else instead so that gives me my big finish what is money trust okay thanks very much

[2:58](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TYlbIDh4maU&t=178s) so I uh field of you look okay so I quite often talk at Tech conferences or Bitcoin events and have a dreadful tendency of leaving the audience uh horrified dismayed and Confused um so we could either kind of go all the way down into the really kind of esoteric far out stuff or we could be relatively consern to take it small can I get a rough show of who wants the crazy version yeah abely you want the crazy version right who wants something that they could potentially work on the next five years two okay so I want to start by talking about the nature of gray areas right I did a bit of reading around to see what people were saying about what money was FR came this and uh I saw a remarkable argument made from somebody not so far from here that uh law defined money and I think that this is a very strong very practical argument in as much as law defines lots of Institutions like marriage or taxation or a whole bunch of other things but actually the the zone of things that law defines and the zone of things that actually happen are disjunct sets right there's a huge amount of stuff which happens that is either not legal or even more interestingly neither legal nor illegal because nobody's ever thought about it and there's an enormous am happens were is blatantly illegal and bu them for years because nobody cares about enforcement so in a sense until a specific situation goes all the way up the court system and all the way back down the other side with an actual ruling and a decision and an enforcement all the rest of that stuff the whole thing exists in this kind of you know jellyish gray area it just kind of has this long flexible thing attached so if we start the question of what is money with this we have a nice cream crisp accurate definition that we can then use to reason about what's happening in the environment we're always going to automatically be inside kind of government box legalism that gives you nice clean precise answers that have nothing at all to do with the real world right or we can take the other approach and we can say right well what money is is defined by common practice and there are a set of behaviors that we expect to see more of less of the generic things

[5:28](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TYlbIDh4maU&t=328s) like commonw marriage or commonw man right well you know over here they seem to be doing a whole bunch of trade in cigarettes and taxi tokens over here the currency appears to be phone minutes you know is that money kind of sort of money it's a like money it's money with Dage it seems to expire it's issued by Corporation it'll be replaced by something else in so once you get into this notion that there are crisp concrete real things age relatively well they're fairly protected they with durability like this state and on the other side you have this kind of ephemeral zone of cultural transformation where things going to come in and out of focus it becomes a lot easier to ask questions like what is M because the real answer is how far along this curve towards absolute solidity has a given kind of transaction or Commerce G right what we're looking at here is essentially an adoption curve With Private Practice among small groups at one end all the way right up this ramp until the thing is not established National inin in international treaties does this kind of make sense as an initial frame right so it's not necessary anyone point to have this nice sharp black and white cut off now it is money now it is not money it's actually a series of decisions made by a bunch of different actors and different enies about whether something is money enough for them to regulate or adjudicate over or even ex um has anybody in this room heard of

[7:04](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TYlbIDh4maU&t=424s) e gold okay couple of hands so I was part I was a heavy user of a digital currency that run uh from mid90s to about 2005 2006 called eold and eold the height of its power was about 80 million worth of gold sitting in in Dubai and Canada I think and it was tradable as an account based currency with all the transactions being done in datas you know I think remember I was get paid about 5 ooun gold a month because at the time gold price was pretty low and I was doing quite well and you could either take that out as coins or you could have them out change by saying a water transfer places and a community of people grew up around that that treated gold as money because it required a lot of fundability but the eold company kept going back to the federal government asking for a banking license because as far as they were concerned they were be a bank that operated in Gold please regulate us please please regulate right here and eventually in 2005 the federal government decided that it would be much easier to arrest the M the Dr and they were finally done ass soon for remember the exact charge was banking without license so this is a classic example of something that had widespread Community adoption that theoretically one administrative decision would drag that over the hump and it would have be a nice clean standard part of the financial system but somewhere in there a regulator looked at it and was like ah this is not for us this is not for us this is not for US ah kill it with fire and that reaction I see all of that same psychology playing out around blockchain technology right you know what is it we don't know is it money we depend who you ask um um what should we do about that I should we regulated understand it well enough to decide whether we should kill it or not but we ignore it and then later on in a rash Panic we can do something drastic and that is the standard approach right that is just how business is done relative to State regulation so um this kind of teeter totter of gradual acceptance followed by radical snap back is a fundamental cultural tra right if you look at the negotiations around say euphanasia right that's going through all the same kind of creeping acceptance

[9:34](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TYlbIDh4maU&t=574s) dramatic bash backlash stuff that you see around bco that used to see around e any area of our society is not really sure what something is has a lot of kind of slow creeping progress and gradual acceptance followed by episodes of irrational panic and if it dies in one of the irrational Panic it's usually G for somewhere between generation Century right things kind of creep in until eventually you've got generation has grown up with them kind of over here as thing that people do and that generation assumes that the stuff is normal and normative and after that it becomes or and that process I I don't think ever really happens faster than generation this I think is a key piece of analysis of what the U Bitcoin guys missing is that until you've got a generation that have grown up using Bitcoin in high school to buy and sell I don't know whatever happens baseball cards they're really never going to feel like the stuff is money because technology is anything that was invented after you for up until that point is just reality and then you begin to get this thing this stuff begins to feel like technology you know I mean I'm perfectly comfortable with parallel computers all the rest it's all just fine you get to talk to me about this you know nasty scary wet biological stuff we're talking about years life expansion by you know injecting people with a goo which you know stick bits back the into their Tes and that begins to feel like technolog that really is a little intimidated so everybody got a nice clear sense of this curve and and you know social push forward back laash forward back laash forward

[11:23](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TYlbIDh4maU&t=683s) back um who's comfortable that they understand blockchains reasonably well okay anybody want to come up here and explain them to the audience brave brave so um I'm strongly of the opinion that um the blockchain thing is best understood as being a kind of administrative upgrade to good old fashioned SQL database right it's a spreadsheet right the problem with SQL databases was always you wound up enormous vicious priesthood that sat on top of them to protect them from people like you and the blockchain guys can of eventually come up with the database which is so aggressive that it doesn't need any database administrators to protect it it's like the Tyrannosaurus rights in databases you need enormous warehouses filled with wearing Machinery that basically just sit there AC computational radiators but at the end of that you get get a database that everybody can write to nobody can edit nobody can hack and the BL permanent as the social construct p and then any monkey can write a bunch of scripts which read and write stuff from that database and this we call the blockchain economy right when you put it in those kind of terms it becomes fairly obvious that it would be you know foolish and naive to regulate away technology like this to database it's a really resilient database fantastic what are people doing this really realing database uh masss of money TR against well against that before they had dat do right so this notion right that you have a relatively confined breakthrough in computer science that happens Stu a bunch of software written against it by a bunch of people that are basically anti-state libertarian Weir and that the result is that this piece of computer science technology becomes irrevocably welled to a set politics that most people find kind of aor phrase um you can have uh Anonymous digital cash or welfare state pick one right most people they understood the dialog of those terms you know go for it and this also gets into Scandinavian digital currency for they're attempting to figure out how you build taxation right into part of the digital currency systems so that you could potentially have a perfectly stable M

[13:53](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TYlbIDh4maU&t=833s) state so to kind of run this off we have this very interesting technology gives good clean you know kind of velociraptor database right it's a database that can take care of itself feral database and then around that people build applications that have a very different structure because the feral database doesn't require a priesthood and you know kind of three-phase power to maintain it and what you see is this leakage of technology and power out of the institutions that have the technical infrastructure and the staff to maintain this kind of structure into people that previously had no access at all to resilient computation and I think this is the frame of analysis you know once you have a resilient computation layer out there anybody can pile stuff on top of that and the stuff that get P gets piled on top of that is the stuff that you can't build anywhere else and this is where you get started path a technology that is genuinely durable in the face of resistance and censorship is to for things the other cheaper better technologies that are F can't be used for if only Outlaws really have enough spare cash to spending it on blockchains only Outlaws will have blockchain but who those Outlaws are varies depending where we are at this curve right if Wall Street really gets on top of Bitcoin government regulates it and they start basically kyc new Bitcoin accounts you unless we've got a nice clean Federal certificate under key we're not going to believe still there not hard to do technically right that's a process whereby that particular thing now has the full status of money because it has been blessed by that most conservative authorities right whereas if that doesn't happen and it gets pushed back down you wind up this kind of permanent stable Bitcoin P of Utopia because it's been adopted so far in and then it can go big no rather than the big yes right welcome to society your handcuff or very sorry you're not coming in get back over there into your cave does this all kind of make sense as a frame I did promise you some fars so

[16:09](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TYlbIDh4maU&t=969s) right now we exist in a profoundly unfair world right we all know this kind of power wall wealth distribution thing you know what was it on the order of uh 150 people about as much wealth as the bottom three and a half billion you know so if we disenfranchise about 3,000 people world to double their wealth apart from those, people wow clearly that's only 3,000 people they could each a small private is right and we can double the amount of we with the average person that access it's not that unlikely that when you have a world with that kind of wealth inequality and you get this kind of extremely durable computational technology in widespread adoption particularly you can't run regular services that you're going to get political change on the back of the ability to have uncensorable free speech and if you think about the amount of trouble in the sheer volume of mass murder that was caused by Marxism on the order of a quarter of a billion served um it really begins to worry me because how long do we have before the combination of enormous poverty who number is roughly 10 plus resilient computation results in the necessary preconditions for a very very very sudden shift in the go as you know the the radical Edge people that are currently largely excluded from reindeer GS finally figure out how to break down the doors at which point it doesn't really matter what the western states say yes or no to about common practice and things will be normal because they're not really going to be doing anything other than putting out fires borders right these Technologies don't exist in a static political Val right we only vote roughly as often as we did uh at the very beginning of English democracy right have fouryear electoral terms have been around for what something like 250 300 years right so everything else in society is accelerated by a factor of 50 100 voting is still happening the same place did 300 years ago as a result it's become increas IRL so this notion that Brazilian computation is just about some kind of you know poxy little digital currencies that a bunch of Libertarians are running around trying to present of the Messiah this is kind of ridiculous right there

[18:39](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TYlbIDh4maU&t=1119s) just isn't enough of a gradient there for very much to really have real gradients are massive pre-existing structural poverty in the world which is left over colonialism and on the other side of that you have populations that are going to get their first smartphones and their first access to access to Res compation Platforms in the same generation and I think the question for us now whether it's money or whether it's not money it doesn't really matter right what matters is whether it's power and if it is power um because it's free software it's kind of power that anybody can have regardless of how little money they've got the possibility is that what we're going to encounter is super owered poor people by a numberous 10 to one renegotiating the global balance of every in a time when CL is breaking uh life extension is becoming practicable virtual reality is everywhere and Robotics are beginning to get to the point where they're good enough to scare all simultaneously inside of the next decade does this sound like it's going to be fun I mean as members of largely very conservative industry uh if I was you right now I would be absolutely terrified but it's not Bitcoin guys they can be Coop extremely eily it's the fact that the entire Global structure that led to these concentrations of wealth is under enormous pressure from the bottom M as they get their cell phones and this negotiation between um those with capital and those without income I think is going to be the defining moment of the internet as we go from a largely white privileged internet to largely poor and BR internet and the negotiation we're going to have over these electronic platforms about the nature of the global system is really where the pain points are going to be it's not about Finance it's about identity it's about access to education it's about censorship Danish cartoonists or French cartoonists being assassinated by Muslims who've imported their values and their gaps at the same time as we're sending up fly their own countries all of that stuff is just a precursor of what happens when you wind up with four billion poor people Brazilian computation

[21:05](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TYlbIDh4maU&t=1265s) so thank you gentlemen yes um if you would like to join me here like to facilitate fantastic really appreciate just thank you guys that was brilant thank you I'll do my best to try and uh facilitate questions yeah and uh get get thoughts from the audience um but before I do that because I'm the guy that's standing up and speaking I'm going to be really cheaty and and ask a question myself and hopefully get a full road so I i' like uh somebody recently described Bitcoin to me as being like digital gold except it's gold that can teleport because I can move it anywhere in the world near instantly and it still has the value that PE everybody the market perceived it had when it moved initially when it when it disappeared so da you made a point I think in your conversation that you said there might need to be these sorts of Reserve currencies or ways of translating between different types of value data can you see days Bitcoin playing a role in that or something like Bitcoin playing a role in that is there is there value in that perhaps oh thanks very much well I mean I I agree quite strongly with d that the the real Revolution is is the blockchain not Bitcoin and I think that was I think that was considered you know an unusual view a couple of years ago but I'd say that's probably mainstream opinion now so I I'm much more interested in the blockchain about Bitcoin um it's interesting the idea that currencies will be based purely on the cryptography I'm I'm unconvinced of that so I think these currencies are much more likely to be related [Music] to see if they're rooted in communities they're going to be based on something to do with Community Values or they're going to be something to do with I mean corporations don't last forever but people will always need energy or people will always need calories or it's something I mean I don't know but I think they're more likely you know Bitcoin I don't want to be mean but you know Bitcoin is a way of keeping score in a mining Network you know and

[23:35](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TYlbIDh4maU&t=1415s) it has a valuable role for doing that but it's quite a jump to turn it into a currency from that and you know I mean other people have different views and I'm perfectly prepared to listen to but it it doesn't grab me that way yeah Prett web developer in the world except then the rate of exchange would be kind of backed by Professional Services if for something was Market it would have a kind of well established value the fact that basically very few places that establish value against Services rather I think it's one of the reasons it's such volatility so it's easy for me to imagine Bitcoin guys get their stuff together and up with Professional Services back I don't see any reason Bitcoin shouldn't become quite stable but if you're not going to back about function act then at that point you must have the same kind of protection dollar here's America shares in America don't ask questions it's all fine dollar and that that's that's workable right you point to the Bitcoin economy show me the transactions exist there just aren the transactions so you know the lack of know international trade in Bitcoin for I think Professional Services are key um you know I think there's a restriction right if they have service on the other so guy that designed the convergence mechanism for the EUR Bel Central Bank pretty much the guy invented the concept of complimentary currency as a description of existing practice so descri we is currently tracing a thing called the Tera and the Tera is the idea of doing a global Reserve currency that is backed by natural resources largely ecosystem service Genera resources so here's the sustainable har here's the O regenerating capacity rainforests here is the future food production of this top and we're going

[26:05](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TYlbIDh4maU&t=1565s) to use these things as backing for Reserve currencies so if poor Nations begin to fail their forests from cash their currency and you know I mean much as the euris makes back it's there it's going to be um imagine if watch technology pass Terror and you around that well you know maybe so maybe so but without backing you know it's either going to have to be backing by use it's going to be back by by guns and if it's not either one of these things how questions any

[26:57](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TYlbIDh4maU&t=1617s) yes D you you ended your your piece by saying what is money money is trust and uh you started off by comparing skinning a buffal building an extension on house which I I get is very rudimental very rudimentary but um the question I would point to you is do you think it's actually physically possible in a society from today moving forward to uneducate us on the value of money for examp to come to me and say if you skin my Buffalo I I need you to build an extension on my house I would say absolutely not skinning a buffalo is nowhere near the comparison building extensional house so that my question to you is do you think it's actually possible not even now but in the future to uneducate us of the value of time and money eff and um yeah that's that's a very that's a very interesting question um I think you you see some experiments which reach scale around you know time Banks and and this kind of thing complimentary currencies which which attempted to Value people's time as equal and and they didn't really get in traction so there's got to be some other way of resolving these claims I mean no one is pretending those things are equally but the question is the value of them might well be very very different but the question but do you need money as an intermediary between them so so money in the sense of a unit of you know money as a measure I guess it's a limitation of the English language because we're using the word one word money to mean three completely different things we're talking about money as the measure of the unit of account money is the medium of Exchange in transactions money store of value so is it possible that money as the mechanism of exchange will go away but money as the store of value money is the measure we have to study yes that's a you know you're going to have to measure things somehow although although of course you know different communities they might have different approaches to that and that kind of one of the one of the things that attracts me to those anthropologists vision of lots of

[29:27](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TYlbIDh4maU&t=1767s) different kinds of which are based in communities is that sort of ecological argument of robustness that you know if if there's only one kind of money and we're all using one kind of money and something goes wrong with it then we're all screwed but if there's lots of different kinds of money that lots of different communities are using some of them might value things in very different ways to others and that's fine for them you know so I'm sorry I can't offer a more precise opening this out just like everybody else but there's something appealing to my in my head about the sort of Community Based argument fory nwork so it will identify complex uh ISO value trade lines among a set of possible transactions and the only way to make it work even money Chang isue so yes in fact there was a there was a I worked on a there was a study done for the city of London a couple of years ago that I contributed to forgotten what the but it was about that it was about could the city of London be a focus of B networks as it is for other kinds of financial networks and I remember one of the things floating around there was London could potentially set a benchmark value stand you'd have like the London Mark or something the version used by these Bor I think it's going to be like a basket of Commodities sorry just to reflect on the last question I don't know if this is any kind of measure but you know we're a consulting company and people only pay us to do things that they're actually interested in and by far we have a number of different Bitcoin projects by far the biggest Bitcoin project that we work on has absolutely nothing to do

[31:57](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TYlbIDh4maU&t=1917s) it's to dig can you could you take just take a stab at how you how you see I mean if if this dislocation is to take place and and and it's going to move from where it is to where you're sort of suggesting it'll go there's quite a the I guess there may be two or three scenarios as to how that might happen I mean either you get some form of atrophy which requires which we might get simply because of the way the current monetary system is being managed and handled which means that that there has to be a completely different approach but whatever it is it seems to me that there's going to be a challenge because it's relatively easy but not that easy I listen to you and I catch probably only about 20% of what it is that you're that you're saying but for the general public and particularly for the custodians of society to get their heads around all this and work out how any form of transition takes place is it's actually quite difficult to see how that will happen so it could be traumatic because for some reason or another a major dislocation brings it about or a major a major event happens or or it could be gradual and wise and careful stewardship that moves us from one to the other no I understand your

[33:25](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TYlbIDh4maU&t=2005s) question I mean personally I I think it's more likely to come from this law of unintended consequences I said at the beginning I I know my example very London Century but London has such a rich history of all of this kind of you know and and of course I'm very familiar with all these examples but the way that the tally sticks went from being a Norman record of taxes to an element of government monetary Poli you know using them until 1829 I mean it just it's again very conserv the way they became the kind of store of value was was unintended the point about the bank in I is that nobody was sitting around saying if only we had paper notes we could that just wasn't what happened you know the bank was founded for a completely different Pur war against France as it happened say Wast but you know what I mean it was founded for a completely different purpose and then it happened that the notes found traction amongst the merchant I mean for a long time the smallest Bank of in a note was5 an enormous sum of money and yet for merchants it became more convenient blah blah blah so I what the 50 noted today 500 so I I tend to go I tend to consequences and if you find something that I also and again I can't prove any of this with spread work I have a strong suspicious with energy as well because you see these nent startups I mean I'm aware of quite a few that are looking at looking at the idea of energy based currencies of one for and that's because they want things that have longterm store of value which goes back to the P right what what do you want to put in your pension you want to put pounds in there which you have absolutely no idea what they'll be worth when you retired or do you want to put kilow hours in there because you know that when you're retired you're going to need a certain number of kilow hours do you see this as being a kind of either or being the same credit cards

[35:55](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TYlbIDh4maU&t=2155s) coming is it that you wind up with additional a really interesting question I mean I think we had a fantastic FS Club debate up in Scotland last year before the referend about whether Scotland should have its own currency and the point is yeah because it was like you why don't you just use why do you have your own currency well because it's an emblem I'm talking um next week just this huge of the social of money all of these different angles we're thinking of money because of our context tonight purely in the sort of financial sense but actually money has a lot of other dimensions and in reality to try and understand the changes you have to understand these other dimensions which I don't social psychological National other aspects to it as well I suppose because I'm arguing for plurality my my guess is that a lot of them will be circulating at the same time if we go back a couple of hundred years like when you were talking about this being that East End shopping mall a couple hundred years ago then nobody would have thought it at all of that you were buying something with Dutch gildas and German marks that everybody knew value of these things it wasn't you know and of course we're in a smartphone age so there might be hundreds of these currencies circulating but you might not even know it because you know I'm going into the Tesco next door buying something with my phone and so it's up to my phone and tesos to sort out what money they I don't even really care you know I mean the price in Tesco could be in some weird I've never heard of but what my smartphone shows me is my preferred currency choice or whatever you see what I mean I do I mean if fact just one comment and then and then I shut up but but but it is an interesting thesis isn't it that if if if the management of money becomes so profit in other words as money as we stand it understand it today and and somehow or another

[38:25](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TYlbIDh4maU&t=2305s) people's confidence in it starts to disappear because it's been so heavily abused that other surrogates that are coming into play which are made possible by blockchain technology suddenly start to become much more attractive so if you take your energy example if I suddenly think actually I you know they've been printing so much money over the last 20 years that I we've lost track of really how much is worth and what value it is and does it do any good anyway and all the rest of it but actually the thing I am interested in in his kilowatt hours so can anybody give me something in kilowatt hours blockchain can give you that in kilowatt hours that's where I'm going to go and you suddenly get a multiplicity of I mean that that stretches Society structures massively I think this is question about right I mean this is the distinction of money relative to Value yeah so um you know solar panels have dropped in price by 7% a year every year for the past 40 years very slow very stable exponential curve right now they are roughly at grid per um but 10 years ago I working call smallest profitable which was one of the economists book of the year in 2003 really describing uh how you actually calculate the value of decentral En resources because the standard power industry accounting practices just can't touch it they no way of understanding what happens in that Ty of environment so years if that Trend continues or accelerates which is more likely silver will be half the price of grand power 10 years after that it quarter Price Power 10 years after that price I mean at some point you hit some physical limit also cares to make it any cheaper because it's just cheaper needs to and it up price likees fashion so when we start thinking about Kow currencies the notion that your Kow simply by virtue of the you know that they're deflated um electronic equipment you know I mean you look at you go to any of the second hand camera stores in London and you see gear that was a, P five years ago is now on sale for about 150 qu right you know old computers same thing and so we're in this position where we've got this enormous deflationary weirdness coming in technology and I think in some ways some

[40:55](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TYlbIDh4maU&t=2455s) of were scrambling all of our money it assumes that you're doing the scarce resources that become scarcer rather than abundant resources that become more abundant and we don't actually have a logic of exchange when the fundamental assets that your societ is based on are increasing in a predictable way on one side and then you've got all this extremely scary environmental on the other like the confusion about value and durability of value uh I think is really fundamental and I don't even know who's going to hand this most of the energy think tanks and the ecology think tanks have no Finance most of the people that are worrying about technological acceleration don't talk ecology or Finance you know this kind of ecology finance and technological acceleration Under One Roof how's it actually happen yet I think we desperately needed to steer us because without that anybody that's working on any one of those Trends individually is going to get slapped on I think two things I I think sure which one I think is more probable but I can see that in if that's true if you move into a world without scarcity then money has two two Poss so either you go into a Star Trek world where there is no scarcity and therefore no money nobody pays for Star there is no money because there's no scarcity um which to me seems there's always going to be do exchange stuff in sh they do sorry they do exchange stuff with cs the ships that's a seal unit ship ship it's star I think it's future there's always going to be something uh that's scarce and you know money can shift that which actually links to your your point about what you might call Emerging Market disruption because if you use the blockchain so for example if you think in in the London Market I mean I I'm not sure exactly but other thought the biggest use of the blockchain in the London Market you know is probably going

[43:25](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TYlbIDh4maU&t=2605s) to be around digital it's you know corporate that kind of stuff right but if you go to if you go to somewhere in Africa it's going to be around land or water or something like thatty or in fact identity um and so and so those things will become MTI in the sense somebody make a profit used I mean I I agree I mean I think this is infu don't take well because you might you might want to create that infrastructure you know to generate if you're if you're uh sorry I was going to make a silly example the land but I mean like if you're a if you're a Russian oligarch right you already put your money into London property you know but right now you have to go to the H of actually buying a house of hiring some Serv but I mean if it was if it was on the blockchain I know this goes boring things are sure we've heard 100 times there's a line of conceptual thought which says the blockchain makes the virtual world more like the physical world because in the physical world you can only have one of things whereas in the virtual world you can have an infinite number of things on the blockchain you can only have one of them so the blockchain makes the virtual world more like the physical world so so if my London land is on the blockchain which makes it easier and cheaper to transact then it will become money like in the sense it would be an asset that people would would want to hold on blockchain and I'd much rather if I'm a Russian oligarch I'd much rather hold a coin that has the title over some land in London than a coin that has nothing I I I don't know what the answer is but I I I I think

[45:55](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TYlbIDh4maU&t=2755s) un expected consequences inity some people itching to ask questions I mean picking up on that um on your discussion about unintended conse maybe this is particularly for D bring slightly back

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End of [308] financial services club 27 January 2015 - What is Money? - David Birch, Vinay Gupta and Simon Taylor. Its connections are at the top of this file; the map is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt.
Read next: next on the same works, [303](https://guptaoption.com/texts/303.md) How To Sell Ideas from (from Ethereum DEVCON Berlin) (2015); the most closely related, [768](https://guptaoption.com/texts/768.md) #03 - Vinay Gupta : History of Money, Foundations of... (2021); his whole career in one file, https://guptaoption.com/story.md.