Before Babylon, Beyond Bitcoin: From Money that We Understand to Money that Understands Us

(14 customer reviews)

$16.50

Author(s)

Pages

257

Format

PDF

Published Date

2017

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Description
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. Dave 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. The author 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.

Contents:

  • Medium of Exchange: Ever-Present Competition
  • Platform-Based Currencies
  • Cryptocurrencies
  • The Road Ahead
Before Babylon, Beyond Bitcoin: From Money that We Understand to Money that Understands Us By David Birch PDF
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14 reviews for Before Babylon, Beyond Bitcoin: From Money that We Understand to Money that Understands Us

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  1. Albert Vaughn (verified owner)

    Thought provoking. Makes a compelling case for a radical change as to the future of money

  2. Alexis Rosas (verified owner)

    I looked forward to this book, but was sadly disappointed. The initial chapters were sort of as expected, a history of where money started, but quickly turned to a awkwardly placed deviation describing how the author set up a cash alternative in Swindon in the 90s. He seemed quite irked by the process and it’s failure. The references to his consulting firm “Consult Hyperion” became repetitive and exhausting, and I lost interest when he, as a supposedly acclaimed expert writing an academic book about money, kept using colloquial phrases like “quid” instead of “pounds”. It reads less like an academic study of money as I was expecting, and more like a transcript of matey bar chat/unpolished TED talk. I got to Chapter 14 when there was just one more ‘Consult Hyperion’ reference than I could take, and I gave up. A shame.

  3. Antonella Hicks (verified owner)

    According to the preface, the author aims to “create an informed view of where technology is taking money”. What an excellent endeavor. Society is currently asking itself where automation will take jobs, where e-commerce will take brick-and-mortar retail and where electric cars will take the oil industry, and the answer seems to be “into oblivion” each time. So now would be a good time to look at what larger problem money is currently solving and discuss scenarios of achieving that with better means available today and in the future.
    However the book does no such thing. Instead, right in the introduction, the author serves up a blanket assertion that “money will continue to exist when Bitcoin is long forgotten” (which, I assume, means something like “for generations”), out of the blue, substantiated by nothing. And then goes on to spend too many pages discussing the superficial details of transactions via mobile apps versus plastic cards etc. etc.
    The book is probably serves a good enough purpose as a trade publication of interest to members of the financial industry. For everyone else for whom money is a means to an end, a detail in the big picture, who just want to know what comes next and deal with it already, they will only be left with a number of hours of their life gone that they won’t get back.

  4. Reign O’brien (verified owner)

    Only read two chapters so far but ease of reading and depth of knowledge really shines through

  5. Harleigh Cobb (verified owner)

    Excelente libro

  6. Maddox Page (verified owner)

    This is excellently written and very informative. If you want to know what the long-term (10+ years) effect of cryptocurrency on our society are likely to be, this is the best volume I’ve found by far.

  7. Laura Ellis (verified owner)

    Having heard David speak at many Fintech conferences and spoken to him directly over coffee as well as an occasional beer, this book is like a conversation with Dave. Intriguing, a wee bit snarky, very engaging and completely enlightening. The best part is I always come away smarter. Dave adroitly weaves the history of money and some politics and human behavior with where it melds to our identity and delivers a future state that is both exciting and scary. The book moves quickly, yes a book about money’s history and future that moves quickly. I finished the first 189 pages on a flight home from the UK, followed by sitting down at home and finishing it an afternoon.

    For any non-Fintech nerds considering Dave’s book, let me assure you it is accessible to the non-Fintech nerds too, Dave’s writing style is engaging and his historical antic-dotes are entertaining. He has a wry British sense of humor of course, that I find wholly engaging and entertaining. If you want to get a good idea of why money works the way it does and will work differently in the future, Dave is the perfect guide to the journey.

  8. Joelle Mueller (verified owner)

    Readable and thought provoking.

  9. Raphael Wolf (verified owner)

    nice

  10. Cole Rowland (verified owner)

    One of the best books about money once read. Gives perspective and few analyzing facts like the one that most of the transaction with high value bancnot are for illegal activities which is so obviously once you think about it

  11. Riley Andrade (verified owner)

    The author is well-versed in payments and money & the book does a good job of introducing the reader to the technological & social landscapes of both markets. A welcome, balanced departure from the black & white world of zealots & critics. One of my favorite books on the topic for its practical implications.

  12. Bridger Bautista (verified owner)

    A signature of Dave Birch’s work is his ability to trace the contours of the impact from new technologies inside of an historical context. In this book he does a deep dive of what drove financial innovation for a wide variety of cultures across the centuries. From there he distills the key themes around what makes them useful such as use as a medium of exchange, and/or as means of deferred payment. Then he uses this lens to analyze new financial technologies like Blockchain, Ripple, and many others.

    The combined effect helps to discern between what is an incremental improvement on a solved (or mostly solved) problem versus some things which are fundamentally new. Beyond his witty, engaging style and breadth and depth knowledge, what really makes this work resonate is the author’s extensive field work. In the trenches illustrations of rolling out new technologies like M-PESA and Mondex show the logistics of shipping a new technology in vivid detail.

  13. Emmy Ware (verified owner)

    It is more historical book than current trend. It mention some chapter of blockchain and cryptocoins.

  14. Jolene Esquivel (verified owner)

    In Before Babylon, Beyond Bitcoin payments consultant and thought-leader – an accolade given casually too often, David Birch discusses the evolution of money and its enabling technologies. With Bitcoin’s breaking $4000, Apple Pay, Android Pay and Chinese mobile payments Phenoms Alipay and WeChat Pay capturing headlines, Birch’s optimistic oeuvre is topical.

    His enthusiasm for the subject, cleverness and wit are on full display as he waltzes the reader through several millennia of monetary history, from Lydian gold-and-silver alloy coins, Chinese emperor Kublai Khan’s fiat paper currency, King Henry the First’s tally sticks – pieces of wood recording debt, the greatest payments innovation of the last century general-purpose bankcard networks, failed e-purses, to mobile wallets and cryptocurrencies in the 21st century. The enabling technologies march forward but money serves the same purpose for the 21st century New Yorker it did for the 1st century Roman.

    Birch often conflates technology and money. Money is a means of exchange, store of value and unit of account, and critically a network relying on technology, trust and generally government sanction. A dollar is a dollar, however, whatever technology’s employed to store and spend it, whether it’s a paper note, four quarters, or electronic bits in a DDA, PayPal, a prepaid account or receivable. Electronic delivery platforms amplify money’s social and commercial utility.

    Two Birches jockey. The payments mastermind has strong opinions about the ingredients of better payments mousetraps, what Mondex should have done in the nineties and rails against cash. The mastermind’s frustrated with people’s innate conservatism in payments, declaring “Money is a field in which conservatism – preserving the status quo is very definitely a bad thing. Caution is not the best course of action.” People are reluctant to abandon the tried and true. Innovation is all well and good, but new money or systems for managing payments must be compellingly better than what they attempt to displace.

    Birch laments the failure of electronic purses such as Mondex, Danmont, and Proton and banks’ strategies introducing them, in the nineties. With cards, cash and checks neither consumers nor merchants had an obvious payments problem at the physical pos. But online, Digicash, CyberCash, First Virtual, Beenz, and Flooz also failed. Traditional card systems were good enough and had network critical mass.

    In the 21st century successful new payment systems such as PayPal, Alipay, WeChat Pay and M-Pesa had paths to critical mass compellingly solving big problems. PayPal solved the payment challenge on EBay. In the shadow of monopoly card network China Unionpay, Alipay built critical mass on marketplace Alibaba. WeChat Pay catapulted to formidability on Tencent’s gaming and chat platforms. And in emerging markets like Kenya and Tanzania, M-Pesa succeeded competing with insecure and inconvenient cash.

    Then there’s Birch the proto-Hayekian who believes in the dynamic intelligence and innovative capacity of competition and decentralized decision making. Advances in the technology of money have been spurred by competition, spearheaded by private-sector actors, and adopted most rapidly in markets where cash reigned supreme and traditional retail-card payment networks and banks were weak.

    He allows government should control money. Nevertheless, Birch cites former Bank of England governor Mervyn King’s speculation central banks could become extinct and channels Cato’s George Selgin observing “The production of money does not have the properties of a natural monopoly.”

    Competing currencies would better discipline and encourage innovation than monopoly central banks. Birch notes people can deal with multiple currencies. And where existing money and payment systems don’t serve, mutually consenting adults are resourceful finding ways to transact, notwithstanding government restrictions. Africans evade government mandates to transact in shaky currencies by transacting in dollar-denominated airtime.

    In the 21st century, however, governments enjoy money monopolies, reap seignorage and debase currencies. Some governments threw in the towel, typically adopting the dollar. Ecuador and Panama outsourced monetary policy to the Fed. Inflation in Zimbabwe reached 89.7 sextillion percent. The economy dollarized because Zimbabweans refused to transact in Zimbabwean dollars. Permitting competition in money as in every other realm would improve performance and innovation.

    It’s fashionable to trash gold as a relic. In that regard Birch doesn’t disappoint. But digital bills backed by gold would retain its timeless benefits, except perhaps for anonymity, and have none of its disadvantages. For example, Gold Money provides fiat-currency debit cards drawing on gold accounts. Gold isn’t the only asset one could draw in lieu of dollars, euros or pounds, with a debit card. Xapo offers debit cards with bitcoin accounts.

    Birch is provocative, speculating “Selfie money should have little trouble getting popular acceptance”. Why not? Digital dollars might carry the bearer’s picture and/or fingerprint replaced on payment by the new bearer’s.

    Like most payments gurus Birch is passionately anti-cash. However, while electronic payment systems will continue to displace cash, it still has enormous utility and isn’t going away in Birch’s lifetime.

    Money and payment systems matter. For curious millennials to baby boomers, and payments professionals pondering futureproofing existing payment systems or challenging them, Birch’s Before Babylon, Beyond Bitcoin is an accessible, engaging and eminently worthwhile read.

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