Before Babylon, Beyond Bitcoin
From Money That We Understand To Money That Understands Us
Before Babylon, Beyond Bitcoin: Technology is changing money and this book looks at where it might be taking us.
Technology has transformed money from physical objects to intangible information. With the arrival of smart cards, mobile phones and Bitcoin it has become easier than ever to create new forms of money. Crucially, money is also inextricably connected with our identities. Your card or phone is a security device that can identify you – and link information about you to your money.
Technology has transformed money from physical objects to intangible information. With the arrival of smart cards, mobile phones and Bitcoin it has become easier than ever to create new forms of money. Crucially, money is also inextricably connected with our identities. Your card or phone is a security device that can identify you – and link information about you to your money.
To see where these developments might be taking us, David Birch looks back over the history of money, spanning thousands of years. He sees in the past, both recent and ancient, evidence for several possible futures. Looking further back to a world before cash and central banks, there were multiple ‘currencies’ operating at the level of communities, and the use of barter for transactions.
Perhaps technology will take us back to the future, a future that began back in 1971, when money became a claim backed by reputation rather than by physical commodities of any kind. Since then, money has been bits.
David shows that these phenomena are not only possible in the future, but already upon us. We may well want to make transactions in Tesco points, Air Miles, Manchester United pounds, Microsoft dollars, Islamic e-gold or Cornish e-tin. The use of cash is already in decline, and is certain to vanish from polite society.
The newest technologies will take money back to its origins: a substitute for memory, a record of mutual debt obligations within multiple overlapping communities. This time though, money will be smart. It will be money that reflects the values of the communities that produced it. Future money will know where it has been, who has been using it and what they have been using it for.
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The history of Before Babylon, Beyond Bitcoin
When David Birch was invited to give a talk in his home town for the very first TEDxWoking way back in January 2015, he decided to return to the topic of money. He had been thinking a great deal about transformation in the electronic payments world for a couple of decades, and because Bitcoin had become a topic of polite conversation, he chose to talk at that event about the future of money.
More specifically, he returned to explore the idea that technology might be taking money back to its past, back to a more local and diverse version of money than we are used to, something he had touched on in his previous book, Identity Is the New Money (Birch 2014).
When he was subsequently invited to prepare a piece on the future of money for the Kings Review in July 2015, he expanded on the ideas from that TEDx talk to create a two-part series and then took the plunge and used those articles as the starting point for this book, Before Babylon, Beyond Bitcoin.
Having been inspired by the sociologist Nigel Dodd’s landmark The Social Life of Money to reconsider the interplay between the technological evolutionary tree of money and its social context, he thought it would be interesting to look to ideas from the social sciences in conjunction with technology forecasting to create an informed view of where technology is taking money.
At one level that question cannot be answered, because the trajectory of technology is to provide better tools. What we do with those tools is up to us, although one might argue that technology does set a direction of travel and nudges society toward it.
Given that this direction of travel is broadly towards decentralization, distribution and an overall lessening of state power, it is possible to bring input from disciplines including social anthropology and the study of ‘palaeo- futures’ (that is, what people used to think about the future) to make an informed and, he hopes, surprising prediction about the future of money, which is that we will return to the multiple, overlapping community monies of the past but that they will be smart monies, monies with values, monies that know about us.
In response to kind reviews and constructive comments on the first edition of the book, David changed the final section of the revised paperback edition of Before Babylon, Beyond Bitcoin to focus less on the general issue of cashlessness and to explore more that issue of smart monies in more depth. He has also attempted to explain in more detail how the technologies of cryptocurrencies might be used to bring smart money to the mass market in a practical way.
In the London School of Economics (LSE) Review of Books, Professor Steven Minas called the book a timely and illuminating contribution which should be widely read by graduate students of finance, financial law and related topics, as well as policymakers involved in financial regulation.
Prospect magazine said when a book comes along with glowing praise on its sleeve from Kenneth Rogoff and an introduction by Andrew Haldane, Chief Economist at the Bank of England, you know you’ve got something hot on your hands. This analysis of money by one of the world’s leading experts on the subject does not disappoint… The growing popularity of crypto-currencies such as Bitcoin suggests that he may have as good a handle on the future as he does on the past.
And American Banker called it an insightful, witty look at how money has changed over the ages when they named it one of their 12 “books for bankers” for summer reading.
A well-researched and engaging account of the story so far, of money in retrospect and money in prospect.
Marvellous. A deeply-researched and brilliant synthesis of history, technology and futurology, and a worthy follow-up to Birch’s pioneering 2014 book on identity as the new money.
The real secret to the readability of Before Babylon, Beyond Bitcoin is the wry sense of humour, which brings us a take on the history and future of money that is unique.
Brett King, Bestselling author of Augmented: Life in the Smart Lane, host of the Breaking Banks radio show and founder/CEO of Moven.
It is insightful, thought-provoking and simply enjoyable… it is well written enough that you could even read it at bedtime without it sending. you to sleep.
More than once I found myself thinking “Where was this guy when I was taking ‘Money & Banking’ in college?’”.
Whether you agree with his controversial predictions or not, Dave’s fascinating tale of the interrelationship between technology and money is required reading for those interested in either or both of them.
Taking a journey through the past and future of money with Dave Birch is not only eye-opening. It’s immensely entertaining. You get Milton Friedman mixed with Bill Bryson. With money undergoing one of its periodic paradigm shifts, I can’t think of a better guide than Birch for navigating this exciting yet highly disruptive moment.
Dave Birch knows his stuff. His writing, as well as being on the pulse of fintech, is always diced with fantastically obscure stories from history, so it never fails to be both witty and informed. You, the reader, are simultaneously entertained and educated. What more could you want from a book?
BUY THE BOOK HERE
Click below to go to our publishing house where you can purchase Before Babylon, Beyond Bitcoin