Category: People

Hitler hoped the £134million of counterfeit notes he produced in ‘Operation Bernhard’ would force a huge hike in inflation and spark a cash crisis

[From Adolf Hitler’s fake British bank notes expected to fetch £2k at auction | Mail Online]

I’m hoping to buy one of these fake notes – I’ve seen a couple for sale near Charing Cross already – but that wasn’t why I was thinking about this story again. It was because, as I mentioned on Twitter, I happened to ask someone who works at McDonalds how the use of contactless payments is going, since they are one of the retailers that has gone for a national roll out.

Fast-food restaurant chain, McDonald’s, will roll out contactless payments in all of its 1,200 UK stores by the end of October.

[From McDonald’s to roll out contactless payments in 1,200 UK stores – 1/24/2011 – Computer Weekly]

My source told me that they saw more people trying to buy their burgers with counterfeit £50 notes than with contactless cards. Are there a lot of counterfeit £50s or not very many contactless cards? Perhaps it’s the former!

In addition, the Bank revealed, some 300,000 counterfeit notes with a face value of £5.9m were taken out of circulation – a 48pc improvement on the previous year.

[From Bank of England pays 82 people more than £100,000 – Telegraph]

Of course, these are a very tiny fraction of the increasingly worthless banknotes being printed round-the-clock by the Bank of England anyway. According to the Bank of England’s statistical release for June 2011, the narrow money supply (M0) comprising the notes and coins in circulation is currently 2.74% of the broad money supply (M4). This is actually up slightly on this time last year, which I believe is a reflection of the number of £50 notes going into “circulation”. Since a great many of these are apparently fake, the Bank is today launching a new version.

One of these features, called Motion Thread, includes semi-translucent windows woven into the note that show the £ symbol and the number 50 when held up to the light.

[From New £50 note released with increased security features – Telegraph]

There’s always been, and will always be, an arms race between the Bank and the counterfeiters and its hardly likely to end here. In fact, as has been discussed for many years, the next step will almost certainly involved chips and printed electronics rather than conventional printing and paper manufacture.

Modern banknotes contain up to 50 anti-counterfeiting features, but adding electronic circuits programmed to confirm the note’s authenticity is perhaps the ultimate deterrent, and would also help to simplify banknote tracking.  Silicon-based electronic circuits are clearly too thick to be incorporated into thin and fragile banknotes, but semiconducting organic molecules might be a viable alternative… A team of German and Japanese researchers created arrays of thin-film transistors (TFTs) by carefully depositing gold, aluminium oxide and organic molecules directly onto the notes through a patterned mask, building up the TFTs layer by layer.

[From Banknotes go electric to outwit counterfeiters – tech – 21 December 2010 – New Scientist]

Whether they are desirable or not is another matter. Personally, I would have thought that a better security feature would be stop printing the damn things altogether. What is the point of them?

When was the last time you had a £50 note in your pocket? Can’t remember? You may be surprised to learn that, according to the Bank of England, there are 212 million £50 notes in circulation valued at £10.6bn. That is 84% higher than seven years ago.

[From Launch of the new £50 – a history of banknotes – Personal Finance Newsroom | HSBC Bank UK]

I simply couldn’t tell you when I last had a £50 note. Thinking about it, I’m not sure I’ve ever had one. But since I don’t sell drugs, dodgy scrap metal or improper influence, I’ve never had the need for one. I can’t help but wonder if the new £50 note isn’t another nail in the coffin of cash, but if you see anybody with one then you will automatically assume that they are tax evader or engaged in a criminal conspiracy of some kind.

The integrity of the banknote industry is at stake; if central banks and the wider public lose confidence in their banknotes and suppliers, cashless payments will undoubtedly gain further momentum.

[From Industry in Crisis? — Counting On Currency]

So it’s not all bad news then.

British Transport police say they need tougher powers to combat the growing problem of metal theft from our railways.

[From BBC – BBC Radio 4 Programmes – You and Yours, 25/10/2010, Scrap Metal]

So, what is to be done and what on earth does this have to do with the future of transactions? Well, one of the policemen interviewed said that they wanted the government to introduce a law that you can’t sell metal for scrap without identifying yourself. He said it would have to be the law, because any scrap dealers who have voluntary asked for proof of identity have found half of their business vanishing. In other words, half of this trade is bent: it’s either people who are selling stolen metal, or people who are selling legitimately-acquired metal but trying to evade tax, or both.

What to do? Well, the British government recently introduced an “e-petitions” programme. Under this programme, they have created a web site where you can file and sign online petitions. If your petition can get 100,000 signatures, then the topic will be debated in Parliament. They don’t promise to do anything about it, but they do promise to at least discuss it. Naturally I assume that the system is rigged, because my obviously sensible petition to establish a timetable for getting rid of notes and coins only has seven votes (you can vote for it here). The link is that I was curious to discover that, at the time of writing, one of the top (i.e., on the first page) petitions is to abolish cash payments for scrap metal.

An amendment to the Scrap Metal Merchants Act 1964 to prohibit cash transactions would make payment by cheque or directly into a bank account mandatory and would be a significant component in reducing metal theft.

[From Cashless Scrap Metal Trade – Amendment to Scrap Metal Merchants Act 1964 – e-petitions]

A sound policy for a better Britain indeed, but this turns out to be a global phenomenon and similar laws are being enacted elsewhere, including in France.

as of September 1, 2011, anyone attempting to sell or purchase ferrous or non-ferrous metals (isn’t this all metals? Ed.), including gold and silver, will be required to pay for their purchase via a credit card or bank wire transfer if it exceeds 450€… According to independent reports the law was passed to curb the illegal sale of stolen metals like copper, steel, etc.

[From Jesse’s Café Américain: Currency Wars: Restricting Gold and Silver Sales in France]

As the poster notes, however, the law has a secondary impact.

However, the fact that no exception was made for gold and silver simply cannot be ignored. The new law effectively makes it illegal to purchase even a single Troy ounce of gold or around 18 ounces of silver in cash.

[From Jesse’s Café Américain: Currency Wars: Restricting Gold and Silver Sales in France]

Which appears to be true. Some might argue that you shouldn’t be allowed to purchase anything for more than €450 in cash. I would certainly vote for this, as it would immediately put the European Central Bank (ECB) in the embarrassing position of printing banknotes (the €500) that can only be used for illegal transactions—which, to be fair, is their primary purpose at the moment.

By the way, the mention of the €500 note reminds me of an incredible irony. The note used to be called “the osama” because everyone knew they existed but no-one had ever seen one. Yet it turns out that not only was he eventually seen, he was a fan of the ECB’s work!

Leon Panetta, the CIA Director, has briefed congressmen that the former al-Qaeda leader had 500 euros sewn into his clothing

[From Osama bin Laden was a Europhile – Telegraph Blogs]

So now we’re going to have to think of new nickname for the €500 note. Something that we all know exists, but have never actually seen at first hand. I’m thinking “the Floyd” in honour of the psychedelic landmark 1973 album “The Dark Side of the Moon”.

These are personal opinions and should not be misunderstood as representing the opinions of 
Consult Hyperion or any of its clients or suppliers

One in six mobile phones in Britain is contaminated with faecal matter… Experts say the most likely reason for the potentially harmful bacteria festering on so many gadgets is people failing to wash their hands properly with soap after going to the toilet… findings of the UK-wide study by scientists from the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine and Queen Mary, University of London.

[From One in six mobile phones harbour faecal germs]

That’s it! I’m not touching one again! Far from being “dirty money”, it turns out that banknotes are actually much cleaner. That gives the pro-cash guys another string to their bows – damn! Not all banknotes though: there are some you wouldn’t touch with gardening gloves on. But here in the UK, we’re not too badly off.

The richer, more developed and more economically free a country, the fewer bacteria its banknotes carry. Also the material and the age of the banknotes – or the money has a lot wrinkled – is of influence on the degree of clogging of the money. Nowhere in the world were alarming concentrations of unhealthy bacteria on money found.

[From Richer nations have cleaner banknotes]

As an aside, if there’s one thing more prevalent than poo on our money, it’s Bolivian marching powder.

cocaine is present in up to 90 percent of paper money in the United States, particularly in large cities such as Baltimore, Boston, and Detroit. The scientists found traces of cocaine in 95 percent of the banknotes analyzed from Washington, D.C., alone.

[From New study: Up to 90 percent of US paper money contains traces of cocaine]

Is that the best you can do USA? Only 95% of your cash is drug-splattered? Europe can show you the way.

An ongoing research project into the detection of illicit drug use has shown that of a sample of bank notes in current circulation in the greater Dublin area – €5, €10, €20 and €50 denominations – 100% of them showed contamination with cocaine.

[From 100 percent contamination of Euro notes with Cocaine]

As it happens, this doesn’t mean that Dublin is a hotbed of cocaine use. Because banknotes are passed through various sorting machines, ATMs, recycling depots and so on, the banknotes contaminate each other.

geographical location has absolutely no influence on the distribution of contamination. A probable explanation is that banknotes are rapidly mixed by the banking system and circulate via regional depots, and so localised ‘economies’ have little influence on contamination patterns.

[From How dirty is your money?]

Can technology help? How can I pay in safety, free from faecal matter and class A drugs? Well, it turns out that the manufacture of banknotes can provide a way forward. If you make banknotes out of the right material, you can protect your population.

China’s yuan banknotes are bacterial magnets, relatively speaking, while Australian dollars circulate virtually germfree. The difference traces to a number of factors — not least being what they’ve been printed on, a new international study concludes.

Australia’s advantage: It’s currency is made from a synthetic polymer.

[From Dirty Money 1: Expect Germs – Science News]

Can’t we make phones out of the same stuff and have ourselves a win-win? This gives me a great idea for a movie, by the way. I noticed some adverts for a film called “Contagion” which is about the world-wide spread of some dread disease, so I clicked on the trailer. It looked boring and a bit derivative, so I won’t bother to go and see it, but nonetheless… what about a thriller about the back room boys from the note-issuing department of the Bank of England (the most profitable nationalised industry in Britain’s history) and their desperate race against time to find a way to cure a deadly virus that can destroy society and is transmitted by banknotes. Working title “Inflation”.

These are personal opinions and should not be misunderstood as representing the opinions of 
Consult Hyperion or any of its clients or suppliers

the collection of 43 drawings by Felix Cytrin of his fellow Jewish prisoners have been donated to Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial and museum, where researchers can study them and they will be exhibited for public viewing.

[From Portraits of Jewish ‘counterfeiters’ donated – Israel Jewish Scene, Ynetnews]

Why was I reading about these particular drawings of these particular prisoners? Well, its because

They are among the few images that exist of the young men who worked in an infamous secret Nazi operation to produce fake money, fictionalized in the Oscar-winning film “The Counterfeiters.”

[From Portraits of Jewish ‘counterfeiters’ donated – Israel Jewish Scene, Ynetnews]

If you’ve never seen it, “The Counterfeiters” is an excellent film. It won the 2007 Oscar for best foreign film (I saw it in the original German with English subtitles) and is the true story of the Nazi’s plot to destroy the British economy. I originally came across it because my son was studying German at high school and he visited Sachsenhausen as part of a cultural visit to Germany a couple of years ago. I was so fascinated by the story he came back with that I ordered the movie on Amazon immediately.

The film is based on a memoir written by Adolf Burger, a Jewish Slovak typographer who was imprisoned in 1942 for forging baptismal certificates to save Jews from deportation, and later interned at Sachsenhausen to work on Operation Bernhard.

[From The Counterfeiters (film) – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia]

Operation Bernhard was the Nazi plan to devastate the British and American economies by flooding them with counterfeit banknotes. They took 143 Jews from a variety of trades—printing, engraving and at least one convicted master counterfeiter, Salomon Smolianoff—and moved them from different death camps to a special unit: “Block 19” in Sachsenhausen concentration camp. There they set about forging first the British and then the American currency. They succeeded in making Sterling notes that fooled the Bank of England and then, almost at the end of the war, fake Dollars.

With defeat staring them in the face, the Nazis packed up all their paraphernalia, including printers’ plates and counterfeit bills, into crates which they dumped into Lake Toplitz, the deepest, most isolated lake in Austria. Toward the end of the war, they also cast chests of Nazi gold into its depths, gold which they had looted from conquered European countries. Ever since the end of the war, this has been a lodestone for treasure hunters.

[From The Counterfeiters]

The Nazis were never able to put their plot into operation. The original idea, conceived at the very start of the Second World War, was to drop the worthless banknotes over England, thus causing economic instability, inflation and recession. Remember, in 1939 the German people had very recent memory of worthless paper currency devastating the economy, as chronicled in Adam Fergusson’s book “When Money Dies” that was given out at the last London BarCampBank. In the end, the prisoners forged around Sterling 132 million, which is about four billion quid in today’s prices. Now, printing four billion quid’s worth of worthless paper money not backed by anything might sound like a reasonable way to destabilise the economy, but I don’t think it would have worked. In the last four years, under what is now know as “quantitative easing” rather than “counterfeiting”, the Bank of England has printed around two hundred billion of imaginary Sterling (i.e., fifty times as much as the Nazis).

UK’s £200bn programme of asset purchases – known as quantitative easing – on hold, Bank of England announces

[From Bank of England halts quantitative easing | Business | guardian.co.uk]

Rumours abound in today’s newspapers that they are about to turn the printing presses on again. It’s interesting to reflect that many economists think that Hitler’s plan (i.e., dropping the money from planes) would have had a more positive impact on economic growth than the Bank of England’s (i.e. giving the money to bankers). That kind of economic warfare predates Hitler by some time. In fact, he probably stole the idea from us Brits in the first place.

During the American Revolution, the British counterfeited U.S. currency in such large amounts that the Continental currency soon became worthless. “Not worth a Continental” became a popular expression of the era.

[From United States Secret Service: Criminal Investigations]

The idea was already old then! During the American revolution, the British had taken to counterfeiting money on a large scale while they occupied New York, an action seen as being one of perfidious Albion’s sneakiest tactics.

Thomas Paine was even more outraged, publishing an open letter to the British commander in which he assailed the decision to counterfeit the dollar. “You, sir,” he wrote, “have the honor of adding a new vice to the military catalogue, and the reason, perhaps, why the invention was reserved for you, is, because no general before was mean enough even to think of it.”

[From The New $100 Bill and the War Against Counterfeit Money – WSJ.com]

I can’t imagine that this is true—I’m sure it had been done before—but Paine’s outrage about the underhand nature of economic warfare is worth noting, not that economic warfare was either new or a stranger to our shores even then. Britain’s first economic terrorist and our official blog hero, Sir Thomas Gresham, had dabbled most effectively two centuries before.

In 1587, he “cornered” bills of exchange drawn on Genoan banks so effectively that he was able to disrupt the build-up of resources for Phillip II’s Great Armada , demonstrating how sophisticated economic warfare had become by the 1580s.

[From Digital Money: The queen would not have it called, as in other countries, the Bourse]

So is quantitative easing a sound government policy or a secret plot to destroy our economy? Personally, I’ll always support the cock-up theory of history over the conspiracy version. In which vein I can’t help noting the final supreme irony of Hitler’s attempt to ruin Sterling more effectively than the Chancellor of the Exchequer. Laurence Malkin (author of a detailed history of Operation Bernhard called “Krueger’s Men: The Secret Nazi Counterfeit Plot and the Prisoners of Block 19”) notes that after the war,

Through one of the Jewish money launderers, the Jewish underground passed on thousands of counterfeits to help the ingathering of exiles to Palestine and the purchase of war materiel for the nascent Israeli army.

[From Lawrence Malkin – Krueger’s Men Secret Nazi Counterfeit Plot Operation Bernhard – The Story]

There really is a law of unexpected consequences and it really does apply to money.

More amazing still, this American wizard sounds the death knell of gold as a precious metal. “Gold,” he says, “has even now but a few years to live. The day is near when bars of it will be as common and as cheap as bars of iron or blocks of steel… Before long it will be an easy matter to convert a truck load of iron bars into as many bars of virgin gold.

[From Paleofuture – Paleofuture Blog – Edison’s Predictions for the Year 2011 (1911)]

Oh well. If someone as smart as that gets it wrong, I don’t have much of a chance of getting it right. In my bones, though, I just don’t feel that gold is the way forward. The future of money is bits, not atoms. Of course, there are plenty of people who feel that they need to hold the actual, physical, bullion and that no piece of paper or string of bits can adequately substitute for the cold, hard truth of the metal itself. Political visionary Hugo Chávez (who announced EMV migration before the reactionary imperialist lackeys of international capital did – Viva El Presidente!) for one. He has decreed that all Venezuelan overseas gold holdings must be repatriated.

Mr Chávez has rejected doubts over whether the Venezuelan central bank has sufficient vault space to store 365.8 tonnes. “If there isn’t enough room to store the gold in the central bank vaults, I can lend you the basement of the Miraflores presidential palace,” he said.

[From Traders prepare for Chávez gold transfer – FT.com]

Yeah, seriously. Personally, I’d be worried about burglars, light-fingered tradespeople and so on and would therefore prefer the bank vault to my basement for my store of value. And I can see another practical problem: what happens if they put the gold in the basement and then forget about it? It’s easy to do when you’re busy out and about establishing the worker’s control over the means of production.

Over the past week, on orders from the country’s Supreme Court, a panel has found a treasure estimated to be worth $22 billion in the underground vaults of a Hindu temple in Trivandrum, India.

[From About $22 Billion In Gold, Diamonds, Jewels Found In Indian Temple : The Two-Way : NPR]

Still, I’m sure the grateful citizens of Venezuela would be pressed to think of anywhere safer than Hugo’s house. After all, there the gold will be under the personal care of the father of Bolivarian socialism.

The wife of Tunisia’s ousted president fled the chaos-stricken country with one-and-a-half tons of gold worth more than £35million, it emerged yesterday… The chief of Tunisia’s central bank initially refused but Ben Ali, 74, personally intervened, and she flew out with the bullion as she joined him in exile in Saudi Arabia

[From Tunisian president’s wife Leila Trabelsi fled riots with £35m in gold bars | Mail Online]

You never know when you’re going to need it, do you? Mind you, given that much of Venezuela’s gold appears entrusted to the safekeeping of perfidious Albion, Hugo might be well advised to double check inside the care packages from the Bank of England.

Ethiopia’s central bank had shipped some consigned gold to South Africa’s central bank, only to learn that much of it was gold-plated steel. The Ethiopian central bank sustained losses in the millions of dollars. A number of people were prosecuted, including the assayers who reported that the bars were genuine.

[From Numismaster.com]

Whether gold is the future of money or not, it’s certainly a future of money. And if customers want to use it then we should be providing products and services for them to do so. I know I keep harping on about this, but it’s a good ten years since I first discussed with a client the idea of offering gold charge cards that were actually in gold rather than fiat currency. As I recall, this was an idea for targeting emerging Islamic markets and I still think it would have been a good idea, even if was a little radical for the time (when financial services customers ask you to “think outside the box” they generally don’t really mean it!).

A Malaysian state is allowing people to use gold and silver coins at stores and restaurants to revive a practice from early Islamic societies, an official said Friday. The gold dinar and silver dirham coins provide an alternative to Malaysia’s currency, the ringgit, in northeastern Kelantan state, which is governed by the Pan-Malaysian Islamic Party, a conservative opposition group that promotes religious policies in its rule.

[From The Associated Press: Malaysian state introduces Islamic currency]

There are other ways to work gold into payments, aside from the spreading gold ATMs, goldmoney and so on.

Garanti Bank, Turkey’s second largest private bank by asset size and Atasay Jewelry, one of Turkey’s biggest jewelry companies, today announced the launch of the world’s first credit card that allows consumers to redeem their bonus points in gold

[From Turkey’s Garanti Bank Introduces World’s First Gold Reward Card – pymnts.com]

If we are going to think outside the box on this one, then perhaps one direction to explore might be to stop thinking about actual gold (e.g., Dirham coins) or electronic claims to actual gold (e.g., Goldmoney) and start thinking about virtual gold instead. Instead of matching up a credit card with physical metal, what about matching it up with the virtual version. The first steps have already been taken.

Earn game time with every qualifying purchase. The World of Warcraft Visa® Card is the only card that pays you to play.

[From World of Warcraft VISA Credit Card]

There is one important difference between mundane gold and virtual gold, though, which is that (pending an undiscovered experiment by Thomas Edison) virtual gold is much easier to copy. If you’re interested in the overlap between cash and criminality, take a few minutes to read this interview with a Chinese “gold farmer” and look at the effect on virtual worlds.

* no way to determine if gold you buy is from “legitimate” sources, not “account cleaning”
* more account cleaning. After cleaned, account is sold to gold spammers used for spam until banned
* tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars a month in customer support cost due to dealing with “account hacked” problems

[From Annotated Chinese Gold Farmer Interview via Markee Dragon – PlayNoEvil – Game Security, IT Security, and Secure Game Design Services – Contact Us at ceo@secureplay.com]

It’s all about identity, as you’d expect me to say. We need cryptography, not nitric acid, to assay the virtual gold and I suspect that this is where the breakthrough is going to come from. We’re looking into a big cooking pot and throwing in Bitcoin, Goldmoney, World of Warcraft, Facebook Credit, EMV and mobile phones. Who knows what this recipe will turn out like. All we can say with any certainty is that the future is going to look a little different from the past.

What I mean by this is that when Hayek was writing in 1976, walking into a shop and paying with one of a number of competing private currencies, however economically desirable, would have been practically impossible. This is still true today. The costs of the issuing of the notes and coins, managing them in circulation, handling them at point of sale (retailers would have needed enormous tills and cash boxes to store all of the different kinds of money) and mentally calculating the exchange rates were just too great. It was an interesting thought experiment, but it was difficult to see it as anything more. Hayek himself discussed the practical difficulties, noting the problem of “cash registers” or “vending machines”, where issuers might mint coins of differing denominations, size or weight, and where in any case their relative values would fluctuate. But genius that we was, Hayek foresaw that:

Another possible development would be the replacement of the present coins by plastic or similar tokens with electronic markings which every cash register and slot machine would be able to sort out, and the ‘signature’ of which would be legally protected against forgery as any other document of value.

We now have the digital money and digital identity technologies to make this vision both real, cost-effective and desirable and evidence that the “tokens with electronic markings” that Hayek predicted are not (as we used to think) smart cards, but mobile phones. I’ve explained before why this is. It’s because cards are good for paying retailers, but not for paying each other. To replace cash, we have to have a person-to-person alternative mechanism and this is what mobile phones provide. A mobile phone is a means of being paid, as well as a means of paying.

There is no clearer demonstration of this than in Kenya, where Safaricom’s M-PESA (“peas” is the Swahili for “pay”) scheme has achieved astonishing scale by allowing people to send money to each other via the mobile phones. The latest official M-PESA statistics, released in May, show continuing growth. There are almost 14m people using the scheme today and 28,000 “cash in/out” agents. (As an aside, it is a business school case study to observe how a new means of payment has led to new markets, new job opportunities and new services.)

If the mobile phone is, indeed, Hayek’s token then what will happen? The answer is that I’m not smart enough to know. When I can choose between Sterling and euros by selecting a menu on my handset then I think the thought experiment is easy to set out: one can imagine John Major’s “hard e-euro” working properly while regional economic blocs get rid of national (nation state) currencies as vestiges of industrial revolution. You don’t have to be a Jane Jacobs groupie to see that her ideas about cities and their hinterlands might drive the evolution of currencies in more economically-sensible and people-friendly ways. But the idea that there will be state currencies—whether national, supranational or subnational—still suggests that the future will be similar to the past, and this doesn’t seem right to me. Money fashioned on a more local scale will be different to nation state money and it will lead to new institutions as well as a new economy.

perhaps in the future, all money will be local, it just that local will mean something different in the connected world.

[From Digital Money: A single currency? Illogical, Captain!]

This is why local currencies, although I don’t believe they will take over the world in their current form, might the best place to start constructing thought experiments about the future of money. One such local currency is Bernal Bucks, operating in the Bernal Heights are of San Francisco. It strikes me as a genuinely interesting experiment.

While most local currencies are physical – either printed scrip or minted coins – Bernal Bucks rely on plastic, which gives them more purchasing power than having to haul around bills or change. They’re Visa debit cards based on bank accounts at the local credit union.

The cards can be used anywhere that debit cards are accepted, but when they’re spent at participating Bernal Heights merchants, consumers get 5 percent back on their purchases to be applied to future neighborhood shopping trips – just like a frequent flier or rewards card. So for every $200 in Bernal Bucks they spend at Big Dipper Baby Food or Bernal Cutlery, they earn $10 to spend at any other participating local merchant.

[From Communities issue currency, promote local spending]

The merchants who participate in the program accept Bernal Bucks in payment. But here’s the thing: they can then spend those Bernal Bucks themselves, making them money not merely loyalty points. The idea behind the scheme is to incentivise the use of local, neighbourhood merchants and small businesses but its impact might well be to give us a window into a world of competing private currencies and help our financial services clients to construct innovative strategies founded on locality.

I feel that neither Bernal Bucks nor Bitcoin are the future, but they do help us to begin to picture what the future might be, and it is interesting to observe that the pressure for alternatives to the current money system is coming from so many different directions.