Casino Royale-with-Cheese, Part 8

Undercover at Money2020, our man in Las Vegas ls lost in booths, babes and benjamins. But can agent 0111 stop a killer new technology from falling into the wrong hands? It’s Main Street vs Infinite Loop in the major new blogbuster from CHYP End… welcome to… Pay Another Day

Part 8: Live and Let Tap

Bond set off for a walk. He hadn’t gone a hundred yards before he path was blocked by a pair of ice-cool blondes who asked him what he was drinking. “Gin and tonic” he said, extending his hand. And then he tried his new standard opening move. “Didn’t I see you at the Woman 2.0 reception?”.

After a couple of stiff ones, it all got a little blurry. When Bond’s head cleared, the ice-cool blondes had vanished. Bond needed to rethink. He decided to try a different tack and, going back to his basic training (Miller Heimann training, that is) came up with a simple plan. He would try to pass himself off as a harmless idiot and hide in plain sight in the teeming throng. So, he mused, what would an idiot do in Las Vegas after a few drinks? As he stood under the Fremont Street canopy, tapping his feet to the thumping cover of Pitbull’s “Timber”, he saw the answer. Of course! A tattoo!

But what? Bond thought carefully. It would have to be something about money, because if there were any tattoos on the delegates at the Aria, they would definitely be about money. And it should be something about the future of money. Bond had read Birch’s indispensable guidebook to the future “Identity is the New Money” while back in the UK, so he knew that the future of money was somehow tied to communities. Not necessarily those based on geographic regions, but also those based in regions of virtual space, where members of communities with shared values might use new technology to create currencies that incorporated those values. Bond smiled. He had the perfect motto. Now all he had to do was remember his Latin from the Lower Sixth.

Cuis regio, euis pecunia.

Literally, it means “whose region, his money”. In the context of the technology-fuelled speculation of the Aria crowd, though, it is also a witty comment on the relationship between regulation and currency. With that, Bond was sure, he would fit right in.

Bond woke up the next morning with a hangover and a headache. The hangover was because of the cheap gin that the ice-cool blondes had been plying him with, the headache was because he remembered that he done two really, really stupid things while drunk. First, he’d got that damn tattoo. Second, he had agreed to talk at the ice-cool blonde’s Workshop on Digital Commerce at the Mandarin Oriental at 9am. He stayed in bed for a few moments, watching the sunshine play along his arm, watching the dust motes rising from the warming sheets, watching the alarm clock tick towards 7am.

The walk in the fresh morning air had actually done him a lot of good. As he strolled along in front of the casino, he couldn’t help but think how wrong everyone had been a couple of years ago, when it had been fashionable to think that the ruthless command-and-control world of A.P.P.L.E could not compete with the capitalist innovate-and-compete world of M.C.X. Sooner or later, we’d all thought, A.P.P.L.E would have to tear down its walled garden and deliver freedom to the fanboys trapped with their iTunes libraries on the wrong side of history. But it hadn’t worked like that. President Cook of M.C.X could guide the warring factions but he couldn’t compel them to doing anything. On the other hand, Chief of the Politburo Cook of A.P.P.L.E could order his massed legions to do anything. Anything at all.