Epicenter - Learn about Crypto, Blockchain, Ethereum, Bitcoin and Distributed Technologies - Brett Scott: Cloudmoney – The Future of Cash

Episode Date: August 12, 2022

A cashless society - one where paper and coin currency is no longer used and instead replaced with electronic transactions. Many countries are already moving in this direction with benefits noted as including lower crime rates and reduced money laundering, and of course convenience. But going cashless does have its downsides. Brett Scott is the author of Cloudmoney, a revelatory story about the fusion of big finance and tech, which requires physical cash to be replaced by digital money or 'cloudmoney'. Diving beneath the surface of the global financial system, He uncovers a long-established lobbying infrastructure waging a covert war on cash, as banking and tech companies promote a cashless society under the banner of progress.He joins us to dive deeper into the thesis behind his book and to share his views on how cryptocurrency and blockchain fits into this.Topics covered in this episode:Brett's background and how he got into the Fintech spaceThe central thesis of CloudmoneyThe meaning of 'not all money is created equally'The arguments around Anti-Money Laundering and Countering the Financing of TerrorismPrivacy and the value of digital payment dataCentral bank digital currencyBrett's views on the blockchain industryIOU vs money as a commodityWhere to buy Brett's bookEpisode links: CloudmoneyBrett's newsletterBrett on TwitterJoin Epicenter as our Community ManagerSponsors: Steakwallet: Steakwallet is your new favorite multi-chain, mobile wallet. Tired of having a different wallet for every chain? Get Steakwallet today and get the power of Web 3 across all chains right at your fingertips: https://steakwallet.fi/ -This episode is hosted by Friederike Ernst. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/456

This is Epicenter, episode 456 with a guest, Brett Scott. Welcome to Epicenter, the show which talks about the technologies, projects, and people driving decentralization and the blockchain revolution. I'm Friedricha Ernst. And today I'm speaking with Brett Scott, who is the author of Cloud Money, a book that's just out about money and how it works and how it doesn't work. So before I talk with Brett about Cloud Money, let me tell you about our sponsor this week.

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Full details can be found at careers.cores.1 slash o slash epicenter minus community minus manager, and the link can be found in the show notes as well. Please also share with anyone who you think might be a good fit for this. Brett, thank you so much for coming on the show. Hey, it's great to be here. I'm a big friend. fan of the show. So I've been listening to it for like, yeah, a long time on and off. So yeah, cool to be here. Super cool. We're here to talk about cloud money. This is your recent book about the banking system

and the different banking systems that we often don't realize exist in parallel in unison. Maybe before we get into that, can you give us a little bit of background on yourself? Sure. I will try to do a short version of some sort. I'm from South Africa, all of my family's from Zimbabwe, so I grew up in Southern Africa. And yeah, I guess I kind of like, I studied anthropology at university. So I come from a kind of economic anthropology background rather than an economics background. So, I'm a big fan of the work people like David Graber and many other economic anthropologists. But actually around the financial crisis, I worked in the financial sector, partially out of a kind of anthropological desire to explore the financial system, which I found a very fascinating place because I was also coming from quite a critical political kind of background. and I was very fascinated about the sort of mechanisms of finance

and how this extremely powerful system that underpins the global capitalist order essentially works. So I actually ended up working in exotic derivative contracts for a couple of years in the midst of the financial crisis. For those of people who don't know exotic derivative contracts, they're just elaborate contractual bets upon things in the world. I was personally working on inflation derivatives, property derivatives, even longevity derivatives, which are bets upon how long populations live for.

So these are all very, they consider exotic systems because they're just kind of like non-mainsterect. They're not like the most popular derivatives. So they're considered exotic. It's like an exotic flavor of ice cream rather than vanilla. So I was working in that stuff. And then I was commissioned to write a book after I left that sector called The Heretics Guide to Global Finance, which came in the wake of the Occupy movements where these people realized there was lots of demand from the public to understand some of the mechanisms and workings of finance. So I wrote a book in 2013 or came out in 2013 called The Heritage's Guide to Global Finance. I had like a little bit of stuff on crypto in there, but it wasn't like the sort of dominant topic.

It was more looking at, you know, hedge funds and private equity or this kind of stuff with these. And then I kind of became involved in alternative finance, alternative forms of money, alternative forms of banking and so on. And so I have a lot of experience around people who attempt to build different styles of finance. And this kind of has eventually led me to look at the tech world, how it meets with the financial sector. But I became quite critical about FinTech world and digital finance more generally. And this is culminated in my latest book, Cloud Money, which is looking at how big tech and big finance are, sort of fusing together and crushing the cash system and the process

and how the crypto communities imagine themselves to be countering this potentially. It's super interesting to hear that you enter the finance field, first and foremost out of an anthropological interest. That's what I've never heard before. So what are your anthropologist's findings about the human in financial markets? Sure. The first thing I'll say is that there actually are academic anthropologists who do go and do ethnographic research and finance.

So people like Karen Ho, for example, as a person who did a book. I think it was called Liquidated maybe. I forget the actual name of it. But that's like these very academic anthropology of finance. So there's a whole sort of scene around these sort of academic anthropologists. I had more of a kind of like, maybe you want to call it the kind of Gonzo journalism type style, which is like less academic. It's just more kind of experiential.

So I wasn't actually officially sort of studying the financial sector as an official academic anthropologist. I was just doing it for myself with a kind of loosely anthropological mindset in the process. So I'd be in these like meetings and like big skyscrapers with like fund managers and stuff. And they'd be part of my brain, which was like this is really like. fascinating. This is like watching what they're doing and how they imagine what they're doing and all this kind of stuff, you know, whilst I was actually involved in working with these people. So, you know, and I guess one of the most interesting things in it is that you kind of realize

how sort of diverse these sectors are. A lot of people who are sort of critical of finance often imagine that there's a kind of uniformity within a powerful system like the financial sector. They often imagine that there's particular people with particular political outlooks. but actually you find a huge diversity of people. But what you do find is certain evolutionary processes whereby if you don't make profit for the firm, you get ejected. So really, these are kind of amoral institutions, which will operate at this huge transnational scale.

And if you don't eventually align with their interests, you are at. And this is partially what ends up creating these sort of systemic effects in the financial sector. So it's not that there's like bad bankers. It's just really that there's a structure that is extractive that will do certain things in the world. That's a very high-level description, but it's quite fascinating, obviously, being in these institutions.

Right now, for example, in big tech, you'll probably be experiencing the same thing. Yeah, I can, I think that's probably very valid take on the parallelisms between bankers. and big tech. But tell us how you got into the into the fintech universe or how you started being interested in the technology behind finance, because that's quite a stretch from from kind of exotic derivatives and hedge funds and banking in general, right? It's a very particular flavor. Sure. Well, my first book, The Heretics Guide to Global Finance, was very much pitched as

at least one part of it was, it was sort of framed in like hacker-finding. philosophy partly, which is like, you know, you go and explore a system. So I was encouraging people to firstly go and explore systems to understand the underlying workings. But the sort of secondary effect of that is that you can try to start to like mess with them or sort of rewire them, right? So a lot of that book was looking at alternative finance. You know, how would you build an alternative style of money? How would you build alternative structures? And so I was using the term alternative finance. And this is back in 2013. So that's a lot of book's a bit outdated now.

But lots of people in the tech sector had a self-image that they were disruptors and also trying to build alternative forms of finance. Lots of fintech entrepreneurs like to use the term alternative finance to refer to what they were doing as well. So there was this kind of crossover between what I was doing. And also I started getting invited into a lot of these sort of circles to kind of, you know, go and talk or whatever or take. part in projects and stuff. But I started to realize that, you know, a lot of what was referred to as

alternative finance back in, you know, like 2013, 2014, 2015 in these fintech circles was basically just financial automation. They would basically be taking the same financial system and automating it. Right. So, we're like, hey, automate insurance claims, you know, automate loan decision processes, you know, whatever it is, automate trading. Like, like, this is what fintech was. This is what FinTech was its big claim was and essentially the idea was through the process of automation of whatever it is you wanting to automate, you would lower the costs because you'd basically be firing people and like standardizing processes. And this would enable finance to spread more because one of the things that traditionally keeps big financial institutions out of

certain populations is that they're not profitable enough. Right. So banks don't go in target particular demographics precisely as they can't make money out of them because the fixed costs of providing those services are too high sometimes. So automation is one technique via which you lower the costs and thereby spread the power of the financial sector or spread its

reach, which is sometimes called financial inclusion, right? So, and the fintech sector was often specializing in doing this and this was their sort of claim to being alternative, right? So, and I became quite sort of skeptical about that that viewpoint and that sort of

but I mean there's lots of interesting things in FinTech but that's how I became involved in looking at that intersection okay so tell us about the central thesis of cloud money yeah well cloud money you can you can look at at sort of different levels on at a sort of very surface level it's a defense of the physical cash system interestingly many people in crypto circles historically would have come out of, you know, a lot of the cyphopunk movements, which led to the origins of Bitcoin and stuff, you know, we're looking forward in the future and saying, hey, in some hypothetical

future cashless society, there's going to be huge problems of surveillance and censorship, etc. And we need to be forming some alternative form of digital cash, right? And so there's lots of these insured of concerns about what if the cash system goes down. So in some ways, I'm channeling some of that same tradition. But rather than like promoting, say, crypto, I'm actually promoting cash. Like, I'm making a defense for why the cash system needs to be protected, right? Which is controversial because it goes against the grain of most mainstream debates right now, which take digitization and automation for granted.

They just say, this is happening, you can't do anything about it, and just get used to it. Whereas I'm actually making a strong counter. to argument for why you actually do need to protect physical money systems. So that's the sort of like surface level of it. But if you sort of zoom out what Cloud Money is looking at is, you know, broad processes of corporate capitalism saying if you if you kind of like press play on a large scale capitalist system, it'll tend towards accumulation of power in large corporations, which will attempt to fuse with each other and form like huge oligoplies.

Right. And right now the tech sector and the finance sector are the ones that are kind of doing that. The tech sector can't actually operate unless it fuses with the finance sector. You can't have these global tech empires unless you have these huge globe-spanning digital money systems. So the ideology that emerges from that process going on is one that's anti-cash. So you'll find in sort of mainstream circles, it's just taken for granted that there's something wrong with the cash system. And that if you haven't yet, quote unquote, updated to digital money, it's because you're somehow like, slow or you've you've lacked the opportunity to yet upgrade. But there's actually many people in the

world who actually prefer the cash system and who want to keep the cash system, but their voices are never heard because it doesn't go with the grain of the ideological structure of our economy. So, and so I'm basically arguing that the cash system kind of stands in the way of the fusion between big finance and big tech. And the actual, the crypto world, in an interesting way, is a kind of, is coming out of that saying, actually, sort of, sort of, of partly agreeing with the mainstream narrative and saying you can't stop automation, you can't stop this sort of acceleration process. So what we're going to do is work with it and build alternative forms of digital money, which is a viable approach. I mean, I understand the intuition,

but I'm sort of like putting the crypto world in the context of this bigger battle. There is a lot to unpack here. Maybe let's start in the beginning, because I think money is something that we, all of us use all the time and often with very little thought about how it actually works or what it is at its heart. So if I go to like the very first central thesis of the book, it's that not all money is created equally, right? So basically, so that you very much pit the notion of central bank money against the notion of commercial bank money against the notion of commercial bank money. Can you explain that? Sure, yeah. There's multiple dimensions upon which I could discuss the monetary system. One thing I'll immediately say is when, as a sort of back job

to this, is that sometimes when economists are discussing money, they use this terrible approach, which they call the functions of money approach, which is, I'm just going to go out and say it's an atrocious approach, right? It's really atrocious. And I wish it was just scrapped. But they basically talk about money in terms of these functions. It's like describing a chair as like a thing you can sit on, right, rather than describing what an actual chair is, right? And so they do this thing, right?

And they never describe the structure of money. They never describe like what the actual institutions are, what's actually happening. And there can be different structures of money over time, right, which might achieve certain similar things. But you've got to kind of like describe these structures. A lot of the time I'm doing is trying to describe what the current structure of money is, is a sort of triple-tiered system where there's at least three different issuers of what we call money right now. And so, for example, something like the US dollar is actually at least three different forms of money with the same name.

Okay, and it'll be similar with the euro system or any other system. and at the core there's these state players who are issuing and this gets slightly complex but a form of iOU so by iOU i mean like a kind of promissory um a promissory uh instrument all right and uh so first tier money is these kind of like state promises if you want to call it that's there's different ways to describe it uh that are issued out and pulled back in so a large part of the sort of monetary dynamics is about issuance outwards and pulling back in. Issuance outwards pulling back in. There's this kind of like pulsating structure to the monetary system.

And so it's dynamic. It sort of expands and morphs and changes. Incidentally, this is something like, for example, Bitcoin is hate. It really don't like this idea of expansion contraction. They kind of like the idea of like rigid structures. It's sort of like stay fixed. But in our actual monetary system, there's this like expansion contraction processes. but it's occurring on at least three separate levels.

So there's at the state level, sort of tier one level is occurring. But then there's a sort of secondary layer, which is the commercial bank money system, whereby commercial banks will take that first tier money and take ownership of it and issue a second layer of money. One of the ways I used to describe this, actually, with a simple metaphor, is to think about casinos. So if you take your mind briefly away from the monetary system and think about a casino, if you walk into a casino with like let's say let's use a US dollar right now but like I'll walk in with a hundred US dollars into a casino. I'm holding a first tier unit of money there. I hand it to the cashier. They take ownership of that and they issue me a hundred dollars with the chips.

Now that chip that I suddenly hold in the casino is a second tier form of money. It's actually a promise for the first tier of money, but it now operates independently. I can use it within the casino. And I'm guessing right now, for example, in the crypto world, this is like the distinction between layer one and layer two stuff, right? You can kind of create these secondary forms on top of primary forms, but like, just as looking forward. But like in the monetary system, this is happening all the time, right? When you go to, for example, deposit cash in a bank, they will take ownership of that and issue you a second tier form of digital chip, as it were. you know, kind of equivalent to a casino chip, but in digital form and in an account structure.

All right. And so when you're looking at a bank account and you see numbers there, those are basically privately issued chips issued out by commercial banks. And you can then develop secondary tiers upon that. For example, PayPal can take ownership of that second layer and issue a third layer, all right, which is kind of like a stable coin. So you have these, basically, these chains of money that are issued out. And of course, in that second layer of the commercial banking sector, one of the biggest most controversial areas is the fact that commercial banks can issue out far more of those digital chips than they have in government money, right, which is often called fractional reserve banking, more accurately referred to as credit creation of money.

They basically can just issue out digital chips and then manage their reserves in the background. And they do that through the process of issuing loans, which I can co-ins if you want me to. But what we call, just, you know, just to wrap it up slightly, what we call the cashless society would really be a society where you transition from being able to use those first tier form of government money and you would be forced to use bank issued or corporate issued digital chips for payments, right? Which has a bunch of immediate implications, right? And yeah, that's an initial exploration for you. let's talk about the implications that it would have if we were all forced to use digital money exclusively well i mean if you're using that metaphor i'm just i've just uh used there on the sort of um digital chips right the the normal account structures of banks you basically require this this intermediary to

engage in any form of payment right so um in order for me to basically move digital money around i to send a message to some kind of institution and ask them to do it on my behalf. So this is the normal account-based digital money systems that we use right now. So I use my phone or I use my computer or I use an actual telephone and call them. There's many different ways I can contact the institution. And I say, hey, you've issued me digital chips. Please can you like retract them from me and give them to somebody else? right that's the kind of digital money system in a very like crude you know description but you can

immediately from there see the kind of implications of if you're forced to use that system well for the first implication is that well it obviously gives those institutions lots of economic power so for example in a country like the UK where the banking sector is already incredibly powerful and too big to fail forcing people to use ever more of that like digital money system basically still like reinforces the power of the banking sector which is a political problem because having one industry too powerful in the country creates a bunch of political distortion. So just at some basic level, this is like a bad thing, right? But then more specifically, obviously, it enables surveillance. They can watch everything you're doing. And that's the thing that libertarians often get

very sort of immediately aware of is this implication for being watched by commercial institutions in this case, which can then obviously be tapped in by the government can tap into that and watch these institutions too. That subsequently leads to, for example, the ability to censor. So you say, well, you know, right now, for example, if I'm a political dissident, I have the option to use the cash system, which can't be remotely tracked or remotely sort of stopped, and now I can engage in forms of activity like that. But if I'm suddenly now forced to use these digital systems, and when I say force, I don't necessarily mean like the state forcing me.

It could be some network coercion effect where basically like the banks and these other groups have basically managed to like recalibrate our networks or our economic system such that you have to use these systems. So for example, in London right now, it's largely not a choice anymore to use digital money. You kind of have to. So once you kind of get forced into that situation, obviously you now have if a bank says we're going to stop you doing something they can or if the government orders them to stop you doing something they can. It has huge resilience problems, right? Because of course, it become dependent on these institutions, they become points for attack, right? So if you're doing cyber attacks, you want to ground an economy to a halt, you just attack the banking sector,

or you attack the Visa MasterCard network. So it becomes a huge nightmare for resilience of systems. But also, finally, it enables centralization of power because if you think about how organizations like Amazon work, they basically, they can't operate with a cash system. It goes directly against centralization of power. inherently is localized and peer-to-peer in the way it moves around comes from a central authority but then it percolates around in the sort of very localized peer-to-peer kind of way if you're if you're an amazon in the world and you want to be able to operate at scale and at speed you have to write you you want to deal with visa and master card and the banking sector you don't want to deal with individual people trying to send you cash all right so in terms of like changing the structure the economy corporate centralization depends upon digital money, right? Whereas cash has this like inherent drag. It creates localization and the sort of like human scale activity. So these are the main categories of issues. So before we kind of go into

each of these issues at more depth, let's talk about the arguments that people who are proponents for the cashless society often bring. So things like AML and CTF, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, concerns, so anti-money laundering and countering the financing of terrorism issues, and tax evasion. How do you feel about these, or do you think these are valid reasons to kind of reject a cash for society? There's two approaches here. If you're wanting to counter the arguments of the sort of anti-cash propagandists, and there are many of these people, bear in mind, anti-cash propaganda is pretty like the standard, the standard line. in most innovation circles. So there's two ways to counter it.

You either attack each claim as they make it. So for example, with tax evasion, you say, well, actually, the banking sector facilitates super large-scale tax avoidance and it uses the normal banking sector. It uses digital money, all right? Like, it doesn't use the cash system. There's huge amounts of tax avoidance

that happen just via the normal bank payment system. All right? Or, for example, safety. Safety is another one. that's often talked about, like, hey, you can get mugged if you have cash. It's like, well, you can get hacked to and they can drain your entire bank account. Unlike with cash, where you can have maybe a part of your money taken, but not your full savings, right? There's many of these kind of like, sometimes cash is attacked as being dirty, especially during the pandemic,

which has been proved to be like totally unscientific in terms of an actual disease vector. But even then, like, you know, the Bank for International Settlements and all these people in Bank of England who did studies on this would say actually, you know, automated checkout counter screens and the pin pads on card terminals are more contaminated than units of cash are. All right. So you can go through each claim it's made and dispute them. Actually, one of the other big ones is that, you know, cash facilitates crime and cash. facilitates all it's kind of like dark money kind of stuff but it's like well yeah maybe so maybe a small percentage is used for that but it comes to an inherent limitation right if you're a transnational criminal you really don't want to use the cash system it slows you down it's physical

you have to actually try and transport it across borders and like suitcases there's an inherent like limitation to the cash system for transnational criminals and you know there's stories of these like big you know drug kingpins who like bury their the cash and then it actually like rots away because they can't actually store it properly. So there's interesting crime prevention features built into the cash system in the sense that it actually slows stuff down, whereas if you're operating on actual transnational digital systems, it becomes much easier to do like transnational crime.

So for each of the claims made, you can like counter it. But even if we took the claims made by the anti-cash proponents seriously, you could still say, look, there are tradeoffs in society. And even if the cash service, system comes with certain problems, the benefits it brings outweigh those problems. So you might be a zealous anti-cash campaigner saying, hey, this will help to solve corruption and tax evasion, and you destroy the cash system. And now you've suddenly created a whole bunch of new problems.

You've created surveillance. You've created a lack of resilience. And also you create a huge amount of exclusion in your society in terms of many people actually can't use the digital systems and rely upon this public infrastructure of the cash. But, you know, one of the biggest things is resilience. I mean, the Federal Reserve, I was chatting some Federal Reserve employees about this. It's like when a hurricanes approaching the US, there's a huge demand in cash. There's a huge increase in cash demand because people just know it's just like offline money is way better to have when you're in the middle of a storm.

Like, it's literally more advanced in that situation, right? Now you suddenly want to get rid of it. Okay, it's fun. Maybe you sort of half solve a little bit of a little bit of the tax evasion question through that process, but now you've like screwed the resilience of your monetary system, which is a bigger problem. So this is the kind of way I tend to approach those questions. Okay. So I mean, clearly there's different kind of clusters of issues here, right? So basically there's the resilience issue. And obviously this comes with being a form of a payment that with cash being a form of payment that you don't need electricity for, you don't need reception and so on.

You just need to have a piece of paper in your hand. The other part being the privacy concerns, namely that basically everything you spend money on is on record, which is not the case if you have cash on you. And the third concern is the centralization of, of power in full-profit organizations, kind of the fintech, Amazon kind of group of concerns, right? So basically, maybe let's tackle them one by one. So basically, I think the security or the resilience point of view, I think this goes without saying that something that has fewer

contingencies works better in particularly in crisis situations. But let's talk about the data privacy argument. I know a couple of years ago there were these, when Facebook still was a thing or when Facebook still was a thing in our circles, there was a figure going around how much your data is actually worth to Facebook a year. Do you know, do you have an idea how much the financial data that we kind of leave behind in terms of paper trails for cashless payments, how much that is actually worth on a, on a per person basis?

I don't know that, no. There's no, as far as I know, there's no sort of official studies. I mean, these studies are quite dubious in their methodologies anyway. In terms of how much can be extracted from financial data, I mean, you can probably work out an elaborate way to do it by looking at the different uses of it for different organizations. So, for example, Google, or alphabet now, I guess, one of the real. reasons why they want to track payments data and they've entered into deals with the big data brokers to do this is they want to be able to for example measure the effectiveness of online advertising

right so if i see some like ad on google i might not actually immediately use it to purchase something online i might actually it might sort of seep into my consciousness and later manifest as me like buying something from a shop now if they can find a way to correlate you know credit card or debit card payments with my viewing of an ad, that becomes a way for them to sort of like make these like correlations and start to like make claims about their effectiveness of their advertising. So this obviously for advertisers is a big thing, like being able to prove that the habits are effective. So that's like one use.

For the banking sector obviously, which runs the underlying account infrastructure of all of this, like for them watching payments data is one of the methods via which they determine say creditworthiness, right? you can gain a huge amount of information from people's payments data about how credit worthy they are by watching the inflows and outflows and doing this kind of stuff. So in terms of like their profitability of their loans and so on like that, that becomes a big data's one of the big aspects of that. Also like cross-selling products being up to, you know what Facebook does right now is

they would make these profiles of you and then sort of sell access to third parties to sort of sell you stuff based on your profile. banks can do that themselves. They can either be selling third party access or interdivision, interdivisions at the word like cross division access. So their insurance division can see certain things about you and so on. I don't exactly know how to calculate the exact sort of monetary value of this, but it's very, very clear there's a big incentive to try and gather as much of this data as it can.

and obviously the cash system represents a kind of often small-scale transactions right so historically most people are using the digital systems for their big transactions like rent and so on right but they're not going to for their everyday transaction the kind of like granular stuff often the cash system is like hiding that and taking and sort of removing that data um which is why you know there's this kind of like this kind of data grab as the sort of if you're in london right now the amount of financial data being generated through contactless tapping is huge compared to like 10 years ago. There's now an enormous amount of data. Now, whether banks and these other organizations can actually monetize that or make use

of it as a sort of separate question, right? If they can actually figure out how to do like AI methodologies or whatever, like big data methodologies to make use of it as a kind of a separate question, I think. But that's the basic point is that there's now this new frontier. Brett, do banks actually, are they allowed to sell this data? So basically, say, I have an account with, say, Revolut and I use my card for everything. So basically I have it like five to ten times a day for whatever. This is a fictional example.

But is Revolut allowed to sell my payment data to third-party service providers like the Amazon's or Googles and so on of the world? well they're not like technically sell it right so there are i mean this gets complex because it depends of what jurisdiction you're in and which particular country you're talking about and i don't know the details of every single financial data law right now but the basic idea is so for example you know facebook doesn't technically sell your data it'll hold the data and sell third party access to you right so they'll say we know something about a person um and we will offer this to you as an advertiser. And I know this. I mean, I've used Facebook for advertising before. You can sort of like tailor who the person is and then you don't actually know the data, right, but you're,

you're getting access based on Facebook's knowledge. So they're not technically selling it in the situation, but they're using it to curate access. And, but in terms of actual sharing of data, yes, there's a whole bunch of inter-collaborative data sharing models that banks and other financial institutions will have. Some of them created through, like regulation, right? But for example, like credit scoring agencies are basically these like data sharing clubs where these groups come together like Experian and they say things like, if we will all be collectively better if we share data with each other. If you guys share data with each other, you will all like have a better idea of what's going on. So we'll enter into

these deals where we can sort of Experian or kind of sit in the middle and act as this intermediary for the data. And banks can tap into that. And governments allow that. based on these like, I guess, concerns about financial stability. They say, well, actually it would be good to have data sharing and between these institutions. So, yeah, I mean, again, I don't necessarily want to go into the, I don't necessarily know all the specific legal stuff around that. There are specific scholars who literally study like the minutia of financial data laws.

But no, banks can't just like randomly sell data to anybody. I mean, that's protected by financial privacy laws. But they can certainly enter into these like deals where they're sharing it. It sounds like a part of your issue with the system is, is that banks are an extractive force, right? So basically, if you look at kind of value that's being created for humanity, banks kind of try to siphon part of that off without always. giving a service of equal value in return. So basically, if you were to remove this profit layer, if, for instance, we had a central bank that issued central bank money to private citizens,

kind of like the CBDC models that have been pioneered by a handful of states so far, but I mean, I think more or less every other state kind of has plans to do so eventually. What's your take on central bank digital currencies? Does this make it better or does it exacerbate the problem? Well, look, I don't necessarily think of the world in terms of like straightforward like goods and bads. Often I'm looking at contradictions and tradeoffs, right? So I don't necessarily even claim that the banking sector is the bank. the banking sector, if you're trying to hold together a large scale capitalist economy, this is how you do it.

It's like they're a crucial foundational component of how the monetary system works. So if the question is like, do you want to keep that system running intact? It's like, well, yes, these institutions are core to how that happens. So if you're like a financial regulator, you very clearly, concerned about the stability of the banking sector precisely because they're such a foundational part of the economy in terms of holding the money system in the credit extension processes. But that comes with a bunch of negative things. For example, concentrated power in the banking sector, huge amounts of economic inequality

by which financial elites become insanely wealthy and get a stranglehold over the political system. and all these new ones that are mentioning, surveillance, all these things. It's like, fine, you can be able to run a large-scale capitalist economy, but you're going to have to take this other stuff with it as well. All right. Now, the CBDC debate is kind of like, you've got to see it in this context.

The CBDC debate is quite fascinating and multi-dimensional. The first thing I'll say about the CBDC debate is a lot of people in the crypto community you have come to a slightly, a slightly delusional consciousness that somehow it's related to Bitcoin or somehow it's related to the crypto world, which is not, right?

It might be partially related, but it's really the CBDC debate precedes the crypto world. Right. So basically in the previous incarnation of our monetary system, we had this sort of balance between, going back to that image I was using earlier of these different layers of the monetary system,

system, you would have the state issuing the physical cash, and you would have the banking sector issuing these digital chips, right? So you'd have physical state money and digital bank money. Okay. And then there was a third hidden part of the monetary system, which is digital state money, right, which is often just in monetary parlance jargon called reserves, right, which is the digital equivalent of it's well a digital analog of cash or something like that like it's but it's only usable by the banking sector all right so cbdc already exists it's only that banks have exclusive usage of it we can't personally use it we have to use the physical version right which is the cash system okay now that's the traditional power balance the state has a sort of like

physical money and then the banking sector controls the digital money now because the banking sector and all these like Reiser and MasterCard have spent so long undermining the cash system because it goes against their profit impulse. So they've been undermining it. It's creating financial stability problems, right? Because if the cash system actually deteriorates far enough, you have the implosion of public access to state money. Right. Now, this is, this becomes a very bad problem in the context of actual like financial crises, for example, where what happens during a financial crisis is people often try to pull out of the banking sector and go back to safer forms of money. So, like, for example, in a bank run, people are going to the ATM,

which is a little bit, if you're using my, like, casino metaphor, it's like conceptually equivalent to, like, running back to the cashier with your casino chips and saying, hey, give me back my cash, right? I'm redeeming my chip back for cash, right? Now, because the banking sector issues out lots more than these chips than they actually have in cash, it's just like people rush for the exits. They try to, like, get it out. before the system implodes.

Okay. Now, in a situation where you have no access to cash or no access to state money, you can actually have huge problems for the overall confidence in the monetary system. People need access to state issued money to believe in the second tier chips. Okay. Now, because the second tier chips in their physical form are being undermined, the state's now thinking, you know, oh, crap, maybe we need to start issuing these digital ones. So, for example, it's no surprise that Sweden was the first country.

to start thinking about the E-Krona, precisely because in Sweden, they basically let the cash system deteriorate to such a level that they are now in a real problem, real trouble. Okay. So the CBDC debate has to be seen in that context. For some countries, if you're a low down the geopolitical pecking order and you have a, in your currencies, it's sort of like a weak currency within the global system, you could be inspired by things like Libra. So this is like these third-tier stable-coin, corporate stablecoin systems,

could have a chance of out-competing your local money through this digital technology. So for some smaller countries, they have been partially inspired by like the stablecoin world for thinking about their CBDCs, right? But not for like a mainstream. It's not that the euro is not thinking about that, right? So, but the CBDC, but the CBDC, creates a huge problem because what will start to happen is the central banks will start to compete with their own banks on the digital playing field, right? Which if you're a capitalist

state, which many of these states are, is a bad problem because you don't want to undermine your own banking sector. So I'm always surprised by like libertarians in the US, for example, they're completely like fixated on this idea that like maybe like the, the Federal Reserve will start issuing with CBDC and it's going to start like doing this nefarious surveillance. But I'm like, well, you do realize the US government's like a massively capitalist government. The US government does not want to destroy the American banking sector. So it's true that it might have a desire to have increased surveillance, but it also doesn't want to just like wreck Bank of America.

So they'd be very, very careful about how they design that. They'll probably say stuff like, well, if we do issue a CBDC, you can only use very small amounts of it or up to a certain amount, before you have to go back to the banking sector, right? because they're trying to protect their banking systems. That's super interesting to learn, especially that you think there's going to be limits on how much CBEC private people will be able to spend.

Let's talk about the limitless spending in blockchain. So blockchain technology has the power to kind of disintermediate the payment process. in that basically the commercial bank go-betweens are replaced by this consensus network. So it already sounded like you are intensely critical of the ecosystem. Let's maybe start there. So how do you see this entire movement? Because, I mean, it's been around for a long time, right?

So basically we've had digital gold, dig cash, and so on, e-gold. And basically it's kind of, it's, it's changed. It's moved over the last 30, 40 years into the first real blockchain currency Bitcoin like 15 years ago. And yeah, I mean, now there's obviously a myriad different ones out there. What are your views on the ecosystem? I have complex views on the ecosystem. I was an early user of Bitcoin. I was actually an early user of Dogecoin as well.

I was involved in the sort of early London Bitcoin scene. Partially, again, I have this anthropological kind of side to me where I like to actually explore systems through experience. So I was always just very like gung-ho to just try out systems and see what was happening and sort of feel the dynamics. So I spent quite a lot of time with the early crypto community. yeah and initially with things like bitcoin i find them really really fascinating and i was like relatively uncritical at the beginning you know like many people who come into crypto are initially very

uncritical right it's a little bit like when there's like a new convert to some kind of like exciting movement they become like you know more catholic than the pope this sort of you know become very very like hyped up about it and they're just like and if you're a person who's like further down the line who's become a bit more like subtle about it the person who's like in the earliest stages believes that you haven't entered the first stage yet they think that you still haven't realized right so i often have this in my like crypto commentary i have all these like newbie crypto people being like ah you don't yet understand the brilliance of these systems because you've never bothered to try them and all

kind of stuff, you know, which is of course, like, slightly irritating. But, you know, I was, I was involved in them. But I guess my first doubts started to merge, which was I could see that there was a bifurcation in the Bitcoin system between the technology and the monetary theory. All right. And they're related to each other in complex ways. But from a technological perspective, the system was highly radical. Right. So if you're thinking about a sort of very broad brush description of something like Bitcoin, you could say, well, it's a means to move tokens between people without the banking sector being involved. That sort of superficially sounds quite profound. For digital tokens, historically it's a hard problem. Like how do you move them between

people without a central intermediary kind of like keeping score? Okay. Now, that was authentically interesting. A system by which a large network of strangers, people who don't know each other across the world can somehow form consensus on the movement of token. I mean, that's authentically interesting, right? Actually, many political groups can agree that that's interesting. You can say if you're a left-wing anarchist, you might find it fascinating. If you're like a right-wing libertarian or somebody who's like a super anti-state and stuff from a sort of more kind of market perspective, you might find it fascinating.

So there's quite a lot of interest around that from the technological perspective. But that technological infrastructure, partly through its design, was forced into a very conservative position on money. right so there's fixation upon like hard money now hard money historically is a conservative way of thinking about money in a sense that it imagines that money should be this constrained commodity and there's a lot of subtlety to this it draws very very heavily upon a commodity orientation to money and when i say a commodity orientation to money i don't mean um people literally believe money is a commodity

it's a way of thinking about money in which you imagine it's like a commodity. Okay. It's an orientation. It's a mode of thinking. All right. So the crypto world was very heavily influenced by commodity orientations to money where they imagine like money is like a thing with value and you have to like grab it and move it around. Right.

And so the de facto all the messaging or the imagery around Bitcoin is around this idea that it's like, we're going to use this radical decentralized architecture for quite a lot. constrained conservative form of money. Okay. And this is where it bifocates away from sort of more like my political orientations, right? Because I come from more a kind of anthropological, more left-leaning, anarchist-y sort of way of thinking about the world. And yeah, so in reality, and I'll try to close this off now, but like in reality,

the Bitcoin system is quite fascinating because it isn't, it doesn't actually, and this is way it gets very controversial, right? I actually think Bitcoin's a very successful system, right? But I believe it's successful because it's a parasite. Now, when I say parasite, I don't mean that with some like value judgment-laden kind of way, right? If you look at an ecosystem, parasites are often very effective, right? They work, they survive, they do what they do. They can actually be very good, at doing what they do. I think Bitcoin system is a parasitic system that rides upon a bunch of things

and it depends on host systems. It depends upon the US dollar but it parasites upon it. Now, this is how I see it working but this conflicts with the self-image of the Bitcoin community which imagines that actually this is an apex predator that's about to like destroy the US dollar system.

Okay, so I actually see Bitcoin is a very successful system and very good at having certain marginal use cases For example, if I am actually like a political refugee, I can use this parasitic system to bridge between different places I'm going. There's things I can do with it, right, that are very useful. But it's not about to bring down the US dollar system. In fact, it depends upon the US dollar system in order to work, right, via a process called counter trade, which I often talk about. And I spend lots of times having these debates with like Bitcoin is about that.

But my critiques about Bitcoin can be separated from. my sort of more general interest in the broader space, obviously the Ethereum community and stuff does a lot broader things than Bitcoin. So I am quite like interested in lots of these sort of more interesting experiments in the broader space. I don't want to somehow just lump my take on Bitcoin with everything else. In terms of talking about a constrained view on monetary system, do you refer solely to the fact that there's like this 21 million cap for Bitcoin,

that there's, that, you know, you can't. And I mean, I know that this is what Bitcoiners hark on about all the time. That basically it's sound money because there's not an infinite supply of it. This is not true for a lot of other cryptocurrencies, right? So, I mean, things like Ethereum, for instance, there's not a capped supply. Does this change your judgment? no not really i mean look bear of mind to to understand my position would probably take a little while because you've got to unpeel a bunch of layers of stuff around monetary systems so and that's

takes it takes quite a long time um but but let me just say this okay in the normal monetary system when i see a number in front of me it's actually a it's actually it's an asset to me all right so if i look at bank account, that's an asset to me. But on the other side of that, if you look around it, on the other side is a liability. It's actually a liability issued out by the banking sector, right? So it's experienced, it's created by the banking sector as a liability, essentially as a promise, right, when I owe you. And it's also a liability for a liability. Okay, so it's a second tier promise.

Right. So, and I don't need to go into the structure of that, but basically in the normal monetary system, there's a double-sided nature to it. It has both an asset and a liability side. And this is partly what creates the circuit-like structure of the monetary system is the interaction between the issuers of money and the users of money. So the users of money are the people who perceive it as an asset, right? The everyday person perceives money as an asset, but there's a shadow side, which is the liability side, which is the issuer side. And it's a totally different way of looking at money. Now, in the crypto world, historically, it's asset only. It's a

It's only seen as an asset. So, for example, when you're looking at like a Bitcoin miner, when they're quite a good creating new tokens, they're basically like writing out numbers after exerting energy and attributing them to themselves as an asset. All right? The banking sector does not do this. The banking sector issues money out as a liability.

There's a completely different structure, even though they superficially look like, they might look like numbers on the screen. In reality, when you start to delve, into the crypto world, this becomes very, very fascinating. And you ask yourself, what are the tokens, at least in say Bitcoin? There are literally numbers, right? And I wrote a very controversial piece about this called I token,

which is looking at the difference between, and stop me if this gets too weird, but like the difference between numbers as nouns and numbers as adjectives. Okay, so in most everyday usage of numbers, we're using numbers as adjectives. So if I say there's three cups on the table. the three is referring to something beyond itself whereas if I say there are three there is three I'm actually referring to the three itself

as a mathematical object right it's actually a noun so when mathematicians are talking about numbers they're using them as nouns they say three plus three is six those are nouns whereas if I said like three dogs

that's like an adjective Now, in the normal monetary system, numbers are actually adjectives. Again, that's a complex topic. But in the Bitcoin system, they're literally nouns. They're literally mathematical objects written out that they have monetary branding pasted over them. And monetary language, which is why there's this huge effort in the Bitcoin community to create this idea that these numbers that you're moving around actually aren't numbers. They're like objects.

They're like sort of like gold or something. This is a huge cultural effort that's required to convince somebody that the number is something more than a number. all right the normal monetary system doesn't have this problem because it has this liability structure right and this will apply regardless of the supply of the tokens right so i can say for something like in bitcoin there's a limited amount of numbers i can write out that's what that cap is right so i'm only allowed to write this out a certain number of times um it's not going to change the the fundamental issue that you're dealing with mathematical nouns this is this is and so so where crypto becomes a lot more interesting when you go past this, right? So some of the more interesting experiments in the

crypto world involve moving beyond the fixation on the mere token. I think I don't agree 100% with the counter trade and the asset versus liability kind of string of argumentation. But I see where you're coming from. So let's talk about the systems where you think crypto becomes interesting. Yeah, sure. I mean, partially to understand to understand the stuff, you kind of need to have a certain grounding in the historical battle between commodity versus credit thinking on money.

All right. So commodity thinking of money is the de facto standard way people think about money. They think about it as an object carries value. It's almost like a substance, right? It's like an imagined substance of value. And you either think about it as a literal substance or as a sort of metaphorical fictional substance. So for example, when you hear people say it makes statements like money is just a collective belief in our heads. That's like a fictional

substance of value metaphor. They're basically saying we've have these arbitrary objects and we've sort of just collectively agreed to imbue them with some substance like value. Okay. That's a very commodity way of thinking about money playing out in a non-comodity. token system, right? This is what, and actually crypto is full of this. So you'll find people being like, clearly the object isn't the commodity, but we're just going to like imagine that the community will imbue it with commodity like substance, all right, through enough usage. Okay, this is very heavily commodity orientated. Now, there's an alternative theory or tradition in monetary thinking, which you'll be very exposed to if you do anthropology, which is credit thinking of money,

where basically you see money as promises, right? So you will see money as IOU's issue. out through, so I can get things by uttering promises. And you know this through your friendship groups. I can go up to my friend and I can say something like, hey, please could you just give me some, I don't know, can you give me some flour please? And I will, you know, I'll give it back to you at some other point. Basically, what I just did there is I uttered a promise that came out of me and back came flower or whatever, some kind of commodity.

right so you can see the bidirectional structure promise for thing and so you basically you're paying by promise okay um and that's an iOU and you can formalize that if you want you can write that out as a piece of paper you can write it out on a computer and these are iOU systems right and this is a sort of proto form of money and our large scale monetary systems right now are like highly elaborate iOU systems now if you're thinking about interesting forms of alternative money you want to, at least for me, maintain this idea of paying by promise, but to sort of like make it more horizontal.

So what I find fascinating is this ideas of these kind of like peer-to-peer networks of IOUs. So this right now, for example, is being exemplified in projects like trust lines, circles, which are trying to think about how do you create these sort of vast network structures of rippling credit IOUs, right? That to me is far more interesting

as a monetary experiment than trying to just like issue out these like commodity like digital objects and hope that they get adopted by a community. I understand the two different facets of money that you're talking about. So basically the commodity like be it real commodity or like an imagined commodity view on money and, you know, debt the first 5,000 years kind of approach. In as how much do you think if you kind of think them to their logical end

what actually changes between the two systems? So basically if you kind of pit them against one another, how do they look different at the end of the day? So basically how is the IOU system fundamentally different from the money as a commodity system?

It's much more flexible and dynamic. That's the basic point. So if you're imagining monetary systems, you know, human economies, if you, let's reverse back in time like beyond capitalist economies. There's one common feature of all human economies throughout time. The basic underlying reality of any economy is human beings applying themselves to the earth. Every single thing in the room around you right now comes from this process, right? A human being has applied themselves to the earth, right? Everything comes from that. And whether that's, you know, you applied yourself to the earth to build a piece of technology, which then subsequently enables you to build something else, the process is still the same, right? There is nothing that doesn't come from that.

So the underlying substance, the underlying reality of, like, value in economy is human beings applying themselves, right? And this is a dynamic process. It's organic. It's shifts over time. It's not static or fixed. Okay. So if you're looking, and the other core feature of all human economies is interdependent. right so there is no historical solo wilderness man who fends from self out in the wilderness this is like a fantasy right um i'm always fascinated by watching like libertarian survival things where they can imagine like wilderness survival and i partly like i used to do this a lot myself like wilderness survival stuff in south africa where you have this imagination it's like what it's

like to survive in the wilderness is you've got to go out and like build like a tent out of like leaves or something, you know, like, it's like Robinson Crusoe idea. Right. If you actually go to a society where people survive in the wilderness, it looks nothing like this. Right. So if you go to uncontacted groups in the Amazon, there is no solo wilderness men. People operate in these tight clans, right?

Where you have high levels of interdependence. You basically survive upon each other as a unit. Right. And this is the de facto starting point of all human economies is an intense levels of interdependence. Now, the key thing in modern economies is that, Large-scale monetary systems have sort of made those networks so huge that you start to perceive yourself as not being connected. It generates this fantasy of individualism, which is what's typical of most classical liberal thought, right? Even though you're intensely interdependent.

Okay. So the reality of these interdependent networks, though, that we survive upon is that they're highly dynamic. They morph, they change. There's population change. There's all sorts of shifts going on. And if you're trying to rely upon a fixed monetary system to intermediate relations within a dynamic underlying economy, it's going to break, basically, right? It breaks. You can't have rigid structures.

So, for example, even if you try just for example, use Bitcoin as the foundational system, I guarantee what would happen is credit creation of money. All right. I guarantee you private banks would take that Bitcoin. and issue new promises against it to expand the money supply automatically precisely because it's too rigid to deal with the actual underlying dynamism of the economy. You would literally have private market actors

creating new forms of money in order to deal with the structural rigidity of the Bitcoin system, which is why it would literally break, right? So this is like, if you're thinking about like, that's what the problem is commodity thinking. It imagines the strange, rigid stuff, right? Whereas the credit thinking acknowledges this.

It says, okay, right now we depend upon these expandable and contractable systems to mediate these huge interdependent networks that we're dependent upon. But there's huge power dynamics built into those monetary systems. So what happens if, for example, we say, let's try and flatten the power relations whilst maintaining the dynamism. Okay. And that's what things like these rippling credit systems try to do. And I'm not saying they're going to work yet, but that's a very interesting intuition,

right? to create these like expanding, contracting peer-to-peer credit networks. Like I would be motivated to actually work on something like that because that's actually interesting. What can people do? What can people do if they feel with you that the, you know, banking tech sector has become too powerful and they kind of, they want to help cash or help, you know, these rippling credit systems?

where do you think people should start? Well, I mean, I don't want to speak for everyone. There's different roles to different people. And bear in mind, just, you know, having earlier said, I disagree with some of the monetary theory of things like Bitcoin. I still see it as useful in the context of the overall structure, right? So I'm not dissing anybody who decides they want to work on those systems. You know, you just got to kind of put yourself in context

and understand where you sort of sit in the system, right? So sure, a rigid sort of collectible structure, money thing kind of has a use in the global system. right um this is i personally would don't want to put my efforts into that now um in terms of the cash question the cash question is slightly different right it's like how do you uh it's it's working in the existing monetary system you're saying how i want to try and stop the dystopian dynamics in the existing monetary system would these slow them down by maintaining the cash system and that's really like a policy question to some extent you need basically a top down action you need people to be saying we have to lobby for the protection of the cash system to provide

us with this like buffer against total bank domination. So that's the issue around people who want to work on policy or protection of the cash system. And bear in mind, the cash system is super, super important for over half the world's population. So it is a massive system. And it gets so little protection in the public realm, even though it's so huge and so dependent upon. It's the world's most widespread user payment.

If you're interested in the more eye. idealistic end of things. Like if you're interested in like new experimentation, which I imagine most people are listening to this podcast are probably more on that end. Then sure, you should be thinking about like, but personally, I would be interested in like, how do you create non-static or like dynamic forms

of credit-based money systems using crypto technology? I think that's super interesting. And I would love to see the energy that gets poured into the kind of like hard money stuff being read, directed towards like dynamic money stuff right um i think that'd be like and i think it already is i think it's already it's we're already seeing it in the fact that the that the bitcoin community increasingly tries to distance itself from the broader like uh web three world right because actually many people in the sort of broader movement are starting to intuit that there's something a

little bit like toxic um lurking below the surface of a lot of that sort of conservative thinking your money. So there's something interesting happening right now. Cool. Thank you, Brett. Tell us about your book. Where can it be bought? Can it be bought on Amazon or do I need to go to a physical bookstore to buy it? It can definitely be bought on Amazon. I do recognize the contradictions of the systems that we live in and the fact that actually we all have to be dependent upon these systems, even if we critique them. So it is available on Amazon. It's also, I would encourage people to try and go to their local bookstores and pay with cash to do it, but I'm not going to judge you if you don't do that.

And it's coming out in nine languages, 10 languages. So this coming month, it's coming out in Dutch, Spanish, Italian, German, but the English versions already exist. It'll be out in Portuguese and Korean and Chinese and various other languages too in due course. Perfect. And where can people learn more? you and what you're up to. Is Twitter a good place to follow you? Yeah, I mean, I'm on, I'm on Twitter as suit possum, which is a, I won't explain that now, but like a suit possum,

you know, S-U-I-T-P-O-S-S-U-M. But I think right, I mean, for people who are interested in the sort of some of the stuff I've been talking about, maybe my newsletter, my substack newsletter, which is Brett Scott at's dot substack.com, which is called altered states of monetary consciousness. I put out these pieces about this kind of stuff on there, although that's been on a little bit of a temporary hiatus while I'm promoting the book, but that'll get going again pretty soon. So, yeah, check out my newsletter.

Thank you for coming on, Brett. It's been a pleasure. Thanks for having me. This was a fun discussion. Thank you for joining us on this week's episode. We release new episodes every week. You can find and subscribe to the show on iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, SoundCloud, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

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