Riches beyond belief
If you want to know what money is, don’t ask a banker. Take a leap of faith and start your own currency
Millions of Zimbabwean Dollars. By 2009, hyperinflation had rendered the currency worthless.
Photo by Robin Hammond/Panos
I don’t have much money. Then again, I couldn’t say exactly how much I do have. In the Co‑operative Bank’s IT system is a database entry that says I have £97 in electronic money. In my wallet I have three £10 notes, pieces of paper with pictures of the Queen on them, issued by the Bank of England, promising me £30. I have six pieces of metal, too — copper-nickel alloy and nickel-plated steel, to be exact — valued at 59 pence in total. So that’s £127.59.
My wallet also contains a £5 Brixton Pound note — a local currency found only in the south London neighbourhood where I live — which I got as change from a local bar called Kaff. On my mobile phone is a series of text messages telling me that I have B£39.61 on my online Brixton Pound account. This is electronic money stored in a database, sent to me by local residents to pay for copies of a book I wrote. If I open my computer, there is a programme called MultiBit that connects to a distributed computer file called the blockchain. It contains a record that says I have 3.8462 BTC — or bitcoins: I earned them selling the book to people in Israel, the USA, Sweden, the Netherlands, Switzerland and New Zealand via an exchange called BitPay.
That’s not all. I have a Totnes Pound, 20 South African rand, and a couple of hours saved up on a timebanking platform. It’s possible that I have other money, too — but that depends on what you mean by ‘money’. The authorities have their own view of what counts as legal tender, or ‘real’ money but, even so, the definition has been controversial since antiquity. One of the most interesting sections in the British Museum is a display of counterfeit coins — not ‘real’ according to the powers that be, but frequently real enough to the people who used them.
I, too, was once a counterfeit of sorts. A left-wing chancer with a background in anthropology, I immersed myself for two years in the financial sector, styling myself as whatever a derivatives broker is supposed to be. I wanted to uncover what exactly goes on in networks of power, to experience those dynamics first-hand, like a kind of gonzo journalist. For the most part, the work involved trying to peddle giant bets — known as swaps and options contracts — to various investors, banks and corporations. In the process of doing it, though, I stopped being a counterfeit and started becoming a real broker, internalising the cultural codes of high finance. I was thrown out in 2010, and ever since then I’ve been fascinated with developing other ways in which one might go about exploring, rewiring and playing with the financial system....MORE
