I thought I had just found a new podcast called Money by David Walliams, the famous British comedian and children’s author. Then I found out it is by David McWilliams, the less famous Irish economist and author of Money: A Story of Humanity. BBC Radio4 selected this as its book of the week recently, and began…
Why do we count to ten? Because we have ten fingers*. That’s one of the things I learned recently which, when someone said it, made absolute sense. That’s why we have ten times table, and everything is broken down this way today … apart from binary 1’s and 0’s, which is probably because technologists only…
I know that my blog is focused upon finance, technology and the future, but there are moments where something hits you about the past and makes you consider it. This is one of those days. I wrote some years ago about the creation of Switzerland being based upon the Knights Templar, which created a state…
I’m working with a cryptobank start-up, and we’re looking at options for licensing. Various countries have various attractions, with some more attractive than others. I won’t go into the nuances of the details as it’s all under wraps, but one of the founders turned to me and asked if there might be a good licensed…
The confusion over the origins of money I, like most, thought money was invented to replace barter. I, like most, am wrong. Money has little to do with bartering. Money, in fact, has more to do with how society moved from villages and communities to societies and cities. Going back to the origins of money…
When I wrote Digital Human, I got hauled up for saying that money replaced barter. It is a commonly held belief that humans evolved from nomads to farmers to cities and that, as they became civilised, they bartered bread for meat. However, that proved difficult if the butcher didn’t want meat, so how would that…
