I’m often talking about Victorian visions of the future to illustrate the issue we have today. The Victorian vision of the future was dealing with a number of problems, one of which was horse shit. Manure. Manure was a massive issue. Victorian Britain had too many horses and carriages on the streets, and the horses…
We had a fascinating chat about digital identities at the Innovate Finance Global Summit (#ifgs2016) today. It was a private roundtable with members of government, central banks, the banking and Fintech community and commentators/observers. Listening to the dialogue going to and fro, I realised that this is one nut that’s too tough to crack. Here’s…
I recently talked about the oncoming internet developments that follow the internet of things, from the internet on demand (3D and 4D printing) to the internet of robots. A colleague came up afterwards, and said I was daft to talk about robots. It’s science fiction he claimed. I disagreed as science fiction is rapidly becoming…
Having covered four ages of moneykind: Barter Coins Paper Chips What could possibly be the fifth? When we are just at the start of the Internet of Things (IoT), and are building an Internet of Value (ValueWeb), how can we imagine something beyond this next ten year cycle? Well we can and we must, as…
The Fourth Age of Man: the Network Age Part of the reason for talking about the history of money in depth this week is as a backdrop to what is happening today. Money originated as a control mechanism for governments of Ancient Sumer to control farmers, based upon shared beliefs. It was then structured during…
The Third Age: The Industrial Revolution The use of money as a means of value exchange, alongside barter, lasted for hundreds of years or, to be more exact, about 4,700 years. During this time, beads, tokens, silver, gold and other commodities were used as money, as well as melted iron and other materials. Perhaps the…
The Second Age of Man: The Invention of Money I’ve blogged about money being invented for sex many times before but hey, it’s a good story, so I’m going to again. So man became civilized and dominant by being able to work in groups of hundreds. This was unique to homo sapiens form of communication, as…
As David Cameron negotiates a new EU contract in Brussels today, the UK referendum on a Brexit takes place during the summer, with some saying as early as June 23rd. There’s a YES campaign to stay in the Union and a NO campaign to get out., with the question being: ‘Should the United Kingdom remain a…
