New money for old

Last week to the Royal Institution to hear about new money, that is to say bitcoin and his friends. With first introducer, second introducer & question master and two speakers, a format I don't usually much care for, but which on this occasion worked fine.

Started off in the usual way at the Goat where I was sufficiently wired up to go for both a large and a small glass of Quickie. Plus a mild case of pushing in at the bar, for which I did apologise to the young lady concerned. Plus the possibility of gluten free gravy. These gluten free people get everyway these days, not like the glory days when FIL started out in the 1960's and getting gluten free was something of a major performance - while now it is an allergy of fashion.

The first introducer was Shaun Fitzgerald, the breathing building man of reference 1 and director of the Institution. The second introducer was possibly Alex Hern, in any case something technology at the Guardian. I got on with him much better than I usually get on with his kind. The first speaker was Alexander Lipton, graduate in mathematics from Moscow State University, now a man of finance in California. An interesting and entertaining speaker. See reference 2. The second speaker was Tatiana Cutts, a legal person from my alma mater, LSE. Not as much fun as the first speaker, but good just the same.

Lipton told us a little of the history of money, including the stone money of Yap, probably snapped above. The stones did not move about much and ownership was a matter of oral tradition, presumably owned by the elders of the tribe. I did not end up knowing whether one could own fractions of a stone. Of the various functions of money: medium of exchange, measurement of value, standard of deferred payments and store of value, although definition is not easy and the list does rather depend on who you ask. Of the volatility of the price. Of the energy cost of bitcoin mining. He did not seem too bothered about the perception that bitcoins was all about the nefarious holding and moving of money, observing that plenty of regular money was nefarious too. He also observed that bitcoin was not that anonymous. In any event, he seemed much more bothered about the transaction charges levied by traditional financial institutions. Perhaps here he was speaking on behalf of his crypto money company, of reference 3.

At some point I did a count of the left hand block of seats, coming to fifty, twenty down from the usual seventy or so. It must be a while since I have done this, as it took me a while to get to a stable count. But same procedure as before: count the rows enough times to memorise the row totals and then total them.

Cutts was keen on trusted intermediaries, trust and governance, with bitcoin having pretty much none of any of it. She told us, for example, that potentially important systems decisions were taken on the back of fag packets in online chat rooms (as it were). I think her position was that you could not strip central functions out of money, despite clever mathematics and programming; you still needed governments and central banks. With my own position being that trusting government, at least in the west, is the best option. Trusting anyone else - for example Murdoch and his rags - is unlikely to be better; reading & believing tripe on Twitter, Facebook and in chat rooms is likely to be worse; and trusting no-one is back in the dark ages.

While Lipton has clearly swung right on exit from the Soviet Union, where there were lots of central functions, leaving him very averse to same. But he also suggested that crypto currencies really needed some kind of backing with real value, perhaps oil or something like that - and buying & holding such oil would, I would have thought, needed central functions.

The bottom line seemed to be that there was not much future in Bitcoin and its friends. Maybe there is something in the idea, but not in these particular instantiations.

Which Fitzgerald capped by observing that his identical twin brother, who is in money, bought his children (or perhaps nephews and nieces) small slices of bitcoin just before their crash. With the result that the slices lost most of their starting value.

Back to Epsom to find lots of road paving equipment packed in and around the town centre, all part of the market square project noticed previously. Fortunately we could still get into the Marquis for, in my case a spot of Sancerre. Barmaids entertained by my explaining that I had 30 years' credit in the establishment and my partner 50.

While our taxi driver told us something of the beggar, a youngish man, who has taken up station outside the station. The taxi drivers feed him bits and bobs, but our driver was not aware of any social action to help him on his way. A neighbour subsequently explained that in these days of personal choice, if someone chose to sit outside the station, was not being a great nuisance, was not a danger to himself or others, that was up to him. He might well have some mental handicap or disorder, but unless extreme, he had to choose to be treated.

PS: Lipton not being a very common name, BH thought that the tea Lipton might have been of Russian extraction, but, sadly, Wikipedia only admits to Irish and the Gorbals in Glasgow.

Reference 1: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/2018/06/hot-air.html.

Reference 2: https://fintech.stanford.edu/alexander-lipton.

Reference 3: https://www.sygnum.com/.