In this episode I talk with Brett Scott, author of The Heretic’s Guide to Global Finance and Cloudmoney: Cash, Cards, Crypto and the War for our Wallets.
He also runs the substack Altered States of Monetary Consciousness.
Brett does a lot of work supporting the protection of physical cash, and I reached out to him about an article he wrote “The War On Informality” which explores the implication of financial surveillance by credit cards and private banks.
This is a thought-provoking episode. We explore the Commodity Theory of Money vs Credit Theory of Money, power dynamics, the importance of cash, and more. Brett offers some interesting critiques of certain Bitcoin narratives and provides some alternative frameworks for looking at how money works.
In particular the Credit Theory of Money sent me down some rabbit holes thinking about how money comes into being as a future obligation and how this theory would map on to Bitcoin, which has cemented my thoughts around the critical role of Bitcoin mining and energy use where the underlying Bitcoin and electrical power are both required to be spent to participate in the network (I hope to explore this in future episodes).
Please have a listen and make up your own mind. Brett has been involved in the Bitcoin world for a long time and I think his arguments and critiques are worth interrogating.