Future

After a tumultuous week and weekend, everyone seems to be asking: is this another global financial meltdown? Bank runs, bailouts, rescues: are the ghosts of 2008 rising again? The Guardian Global banking is now inside Schrödinger’s box, The Financial Times What’s wrong with the banks, The Economist Megan Greene discusses the idea, in The Financial…

I often return to a theme: where’s my guarantee? Where’s my backup? After the failure of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank during the past week, it begs the question: where’s my guarantee? Where’s my backup? After losing money on MtGox ten years ago: where’s my guarantee? Where’s my backup? With the failure of FTX and Terra-Luna: where’s…

Predictions about banking in the future After I posted my banks disappear post, Glenn Stanford replied to me on LinkedIn with a link to this: A history of the future of banking: predictions and outcomes by Maria Gloria Cobas and Larry R. Mote, Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and James A. Wilcox, Haas School of…

There’s that line in George Orwell’s Animal Farm: All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others It always makes me feel slightly uncomfortable, as it would be nice if we had an egalitarian world where everyone was equal … but it’s never going to happen. This struck me when I was…

I spend every day thinking about tomorrow. I’m now kind of troubled about tomorrow when I think about yesterday. Many things of old were great. The fact they’ve all gone or are going is maybe an issue. The fact that vinyl disappeared, replaced by CDs and now streaming was something. Yet, it’s weird, as it…

A long time ago – so long ago that most people reading this weren’t born or had just started school – I said to my boss that cash machines were dead. At the time, I worked for NCR which stands for National Cash Registers, the cash machine company. The comment was not a popular one….

I often refer to Bernard Lietaer, my late friend, and his work on community currencies. You can read his book for free here. It got me into a whole load of other areas from the Long Now to time as a currency. Have you thought about time as a currency? Maybe my favourite example of…

Talking about time, I got a nudge from Bloomberg about an artist in time. The story is about Max Büsser who, with his band of revolutionaries, made products they wanted themselves and built a huge fandom on the way. What’s the product? A wristwatch. Max worked for luxury jeweller Harry Winston but was unhappy. He…

One of my favourite series, Black Mirror, is about to return to Netflix for Series 6. So, it made me think about the future world and thought I would give an outline of an episode. I’m no screenwriter but … you never know. Black Mirror, Season 7, Episode 3: The Office I’m living in a…

I received a bunch of interesting pings this week, but a few stood out. The main one was about the climate impact of crypto: Ethereum has managed to massively decrease its annual CO2 emissions as it has moved to a proof-of-stake blockchain. In 2021, it was creating a huge 21.95 million tons of CO2, which…