Download or read book Before Babylon Beyond Bitcoin written by David Birch and published by London Publishing Partnership. This book was released on 2017-06-15 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Technology is changing money: it has been transformed 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. To see where these developments might be taking us, David 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.
Download or read book Before Babylon Beyond Bitcoin written by David G. W. Birch and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Social Life of Money written by Nigel Dodd and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2016-02-09 with total page 465 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A reevaluation of what money is—and what it might be Questions about the nature of money have gained a new urgency in the aftermath of the global financial crisis. Even as many people have less of it, there are more forms and systems of money, from local currencies and social lending to mobile money and Bitcoin. Yet our understanding of what money is—and what it might be—hasn't kept pace. In The Social Life of Money, Nigel Dodd, one of today’s leading sociologists of money, reformulates the theory of the subject for a postcrisis world in which new kinds of money are proliferating. What counts as legitimate action by central banks that issue currency and set policy? What underpins the right of nongovernmental actors to create new currencies? And how might new forms of money surpass or subvert government-sanctioned currencies? To answer such questions, The Social Life of Money takes a fresh and wide-ranging look at modern theories of money. One of the book’s central concerns is how money can be wrested from the domination and mismanagement of banks and governments and restored to its fundamental position as the "claim upon society" described by Georg Simmel. But rather than advancing yet another critique of the state-based monetary system, The Social Life of Money draws out the utopian aspects of money and the ways in which its transformation could in turn transform society, politics, and economics. The book also identifies the contributions of thinkers who have not previously been thought of as monetary theorists—including Nietzsche, Benjamin, Bataille, Deleuze and Guattari, Baudrillard, Derrida, and Hardt and Negri. The result provides new ways of thinking about money that seek not only to understand it but to change it.
Download or read book The Currency Cold War Cash and Cryptography Hash Rates and Hegemony written by David Birch and published by London Publishing Partnership. This book was released on 2020-05-27 with total page 259 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Money is changing and this may mean a new world order. David Birch sets out the economic and technological imperatives concerning digital money, and discusses its potential impact. Tensions will inevitably arise: between old and new, between public and private, and, most importantly, between East and West. This book contributes to the debate that we must have to shape the International Monetary and Financial System of the near future.
Download or read book Advances in Artificial Intelligence Software and Systems Engineering written by Tareq Ahram and published by Springer. This book was released on 2019-06-10 with total page 669 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book addresses emerging issues resulting from the integration of artificial intelligence systems in our daily lives. It focuses on the cognitive, visual, social and analytical aspects of computing and intelligent technologies, highlighting ways to improve the acceptance, effectiveness, and efficiency of said technologies. Topics such as responsibility, integration and training are discussed throughout. The book also reports on the latest advances in systems engineering, with a focus on societal challenges and next-generation systems and applications for meeting them. The book is based on two AHFE 2019 Affiliated Conferences – on Artificial Intelligence and Social Computing, and on Service, Software, and Systems Engineering –, which were jointly held on July 24–28, 2019, in Washington, DC, USA.
Download or read book Distributed Creativity written by Marcus O'Dair and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-10-03 with total page 167 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Blockchain technology may have first emerged with bitcoin but its significance extends far beyond the financial sector: it is ushering in a whole new techno-economic paradigm. This book provides the first critical, in-depth examination of blockchain’s transformative impact on the creative industries, including music, media, art and gaming. Drawing on interviews with 10 leading start-ups and a comprehensive review of the literature, the author examines blockchain’s impact on business models, addresses the barriers and risks, and concludes with policy recommendations that will help unlock value in the UK’s creative economy.
Download or read book Who s Cashing In written by Atreyee Sen and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2020-08-01 with total page 198 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cashless infrastructures are rapidly increasing, as credit cards, cryptocurrencies, online and mobile money, remittances, demonetization, and digitalization process replace coins and currencies around the world. Who’s Cashing In? explores how different modes of cashlessness impact, transform and challenge the everyday lives and livelihoods of local communities. Drawing from a wide range of ethnographic studies, this volume offers a concise look at how social actors and intermediaries respond to this change in the materiality of money throughout multiple regional contexts.
Download or read book Money and Debt The Public Role of Banks written by Bart Stellinga and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2021 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This Open Access book from the Netherlands Scientific Council for Government Policy explains how money creation and banking works, describes the main problems of the current monetary and financial system and discusses several reform options. This book systematically evaluates proposals for fundamental monetary reform, including ideas to separate money and credit by breaking up banks, introducing a central bank digital currency, and introducing public payment banks. By drawing on these plans, the authors suggest several concrete reforms to the current banking system with the aim to ensure that the monetary system remains stable, contributes to the Dutch economy, fairly distributes benefits, costs and risks, and enjoys public legitimacy. This systematic approach, and the accessible way in which the book is written, allows specialized and non-specialised readers to understand the intricacies of money, banking, monetary reform and financial innovation, far beyond the Dutch context [Resumen de la editorial]
Download or read book God Save Texas written by Lawrence Wright and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2018-04-17 with total page 307 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FINALIST • The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Looming Tower—and a Texas native—takes us on a journey through the most controversial state in America. • “Beautifully written…. Essential reading [for] anyone who wants to understand how one state changed the trajectory of the country.” —NPR Texas is a red state, but the cities are blue and among the most diverse in the nation. Oil is still king, but Texas now leads California in technology exports. Low taxes and minimal regulation have produced extraordinary growth, but also striking income disparities. Texas looks a lot like the America that Donald Trump wants to create. Bringing together the historical and the contemporary, the political and the personal, Texas native Lawrence Wright gives us a colorful, wide-ranging portrait of a state that not only reflects our country as it is, but as it may become—and shows how the battle for Texas’s soul encompasses us all.
Download or read book Digital Identity Management written by David G. W. Birch and published by Gower Publishing, Ltd.. This book was released on 2007 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The goals of this book are to examine the functional components that take basic identity systems and turn them into identity management operations and to highlight some of the implications of those operations for identity management schemes.
Download or read book It s Mine written by Steven Boykey Sidley and published by Legend Press Ltd. This book was released on 2023-08-21 with total page 82 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ‘Crypto’, a loose term that means many things to different people, only entered the public consciousness within the last five years or so, now evident by the volume of public discussion, commentary and analysis spread across every conceivable media outlet.
Download or read book The Bitcoin Standard written by Saifedean Ammous and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2018-03-23 with total page 311 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A comprehensive and authoritative exploration of Bitcoin and its place in monetary history When a pseudonymous programmer introduced "a new electronic cash system that’s fully peer-to-peer, with no trusted third party" to a small online mailing list in 2008, very few people paid attention. Ten years later, and against all odds, this upstart autonomous decentralized software offers an unstoppable and globally accessible hard money alternative to modern central banks. The Bitcoin Standard analyzes the historical context to the rise of Bitcoin, the economic properties that have allowed it to grow quickly, and its likely economic, political, and social implications. While Bitcoin is an invention of the digital age, the problem it purports to solve is as old as human society itself: transferring value across time and space. Author Saifedean Ammous takes the reader on an engaging journey through the history of technologies performing the functions of money, from primitive systems of trading limestones and seashells, to metals, coins, the gold standard, and modern government debt. Exploring what gave these technologies their monetary role, and how most lost it, provides the reader with a good idea of what makes for sound money, and sets the stage for an economic discussion of its consequences for individual and societal future-orientation, capital accumulation, trade, peace, culture, and art. Compellingly, Ammous shows that it is no coincidence that the loftiest achievements of humanity have come in societies enjoying the benefits of sound monetary regimes, nor is it coincidental that monetary collapse has usually accompanied civilizational collapse. With this background in place, the book moves on to explain the operation of Bitcoin in a functional and intuitive way. Bitcoin is a decentralized, distributed piece of software that converts electricity and processing power into indisputably accurate records, thus allowing its users to utilize the Internet to perform the traditional functions of money without having to rely on, or trust, any authorities or infrastructure in the physical world. Bitcoin is thus best understood as the first successfully implemented form of digital cash and digital hard money. With an automated and perfectly predictable monetary policy, and the ability to perform final settlement of large sums across the world in a matter of minutes, Bitcoin’s real competitive edge might just be as a store of value and network for the final settlement of large payments a digital form of gold with a built-in settlement infrastructure. Ammous’ firm grasp of the technological possibilities as well as the historical realities of monetary evolution provides for a fascinating exploration of the ramifications of voluntary free market money. As it challenges the most sacred of government monopolies, Bitcoin shifts the pendulum of sovereignty away from governments in favor of individuals, offering us the tantalizing possibility of a world where money is fully extricated from politics and unrestrained by borders. The final chapter of the book explores some of the most common questions surrounding Bitcoin: Is Bitcoin mining a waste of energy? Is Bitcoin for criminals? Who controls Bitcoin, and can they change it if they please? How can Bitcoin be killed? And what to make of all the thousands of Bitcoin knockoffs, and the many supposed applications of Bitcoin's 'block chain technology'? The Bitcoin Standard is the essential resource for a clear understanding of the rise of the Internet’s decentralized, apolitical, free-market alternative to national central banks.
Download or read book Self Sovereign Identity written by Alex Preukschat and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2021-06-08 with total page 502 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "With Christopher Allen, Fabian Vogelsteller, and 52 other leading identity experts"--Cover.
Download or read book The Executive Guide to Blockchain written by Maria Grazia Vigliotti and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-02-25 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Keeping up with fast evolving technology is a challenge that every business leader faces. As organisations start to wake up to the Fourth Industrial Revolution, it’s becoming more important than ever to be able to utilise and exploit new digital platforms. With the simple aim of demystifying blockchain for business leaders, The Executive Guide to Blockchain offers a jargon-free explanation and framework to better understand blockchain technologies and their impact on organizations. Enabling any business leader with or without specific computing knowledge to reap the benefits of blockchain whilst understanding the limitations, this book will empower you to: Identify opportunities for blockchain in your own business sectors Understand smart contracts and their relationship with the law Create a blockchain strategy and business case Implement blockchain technologies and maximise their potential. Written by experts in non-technical language, this practical resource can be applied to any industry, and arm you with the knowledge needed to capture the possibilities of digital business.
Download or read book The Pay Off written by Gottfried Leibbrandt and published by Elliott & Thompson. This book was released on 2022-04-14 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How we pay is so fundamental that it underpins everything - from trade to taxation, stocks and savings to salaries, pensions and pocket money. Rich or poor, criminal, communist or capitalist, we all rely on the same payments system, day in, day out. It sits between us and not just economic meltdown, but a total breakdown in law and order. Why then do we know so little about how it really works? As you read this, technology is dismantling payment barriers and governments are erecting them; cash is on the way out, and crypto and BigTech are fighting their way in. The Europeans are heavily regulated, the Americans oddly backward, and the Chinese hoping to lead the way forward. Challenging our understanding about where financial power really lies, The Pay Off shows us that the most important thing about money is the way we move it. Leibbrandt and De Terán shine a light on the hidden workings of the humble payment - and reveal both how our payment habits are determined by history as well as where we go from here. From national customs to warring nation states, geopolitics will shape the future of payments every bit as much as technology.
Download or read book Quest for Good Money written by Yukinobu Kitamura and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2022-12-07 with total page 159 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This open access book examines the history and role of money. Money is often defined in terms of three interrelated functions: as a medium of exchange, store of value and unit of account. Researchers frequently discuss the first two functions, but tend to ignore unit of account. This book focuses on how a unit of account or denomination can be defined and can be derived from the monetary system. In the case of paper money and coins, we know how to determine the denomination of money based on the problem of the least number of weights defined by Bâchet and proved by Hardy and Wright (1960). However, in the case of digital or cryptocurrency, denomination may not matter because digital or cryptocurrency uses a wallet that is essentially denomination free: a wallet can contain any amount of currency without upper and lower limits. When people talk about the stablecoin, i.e. the stable price of digital and cryptocurrency with the major legal tender, they take a unit of account or denomination of digital or cryptocurrency as given. This arrangement destroys the nature of denomination free or decentralized autonomy as it were. Exploring how we can consolidate with these two views of denomination, this book will appeal to anyone interested in creating new digital or cryptocurrencies. It also serves as a textbook on central bank digital currency.
Download or read book Driverless Cars On a Road to Nowhere written by Christian Wolmar and published by London Publishing Partnership. This book was released on 2018-01-18 with total page 136 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Driverless cars are the future. That is what the tech giants, the auto industry and even the government want us to think. Almost daily there are media stories about how we will soon all be able to rip up our driving licences, sit in the back seat and let the car take us around. But is this really going to happen? Christian Wolmar has dug behind the hype and found a very different story. We are nowhere near this driverless utopia. Indeed it may prove to be impossible to reach. And even if it were achievable, does anyone want it? Far from reducing traffic and pollution, millions of zombie cars on the roads would make them worse. Wolmar looks at the technical and other difficulties that make this driverless future a very uncertain proposition. He finds that it is the tech companies and the auto manufacturers who are desperate to get us out of the driving seat, and argues that far from making the roads safer, driverless cars may well make them more dangerous. This entertaining polemic sets out the many technical, legal and moral problems that obstruct the path to a driverless future, and debunks many of the myths around that future’s purported benefits.
