I have no academic papers or historical research view on what I’m about to post, although I will find some, but I was reflecting on my discussions of revolutions in humanity. In particular, the second age of humankind, when we invented money as a control mechanism. Before this seismic change, money didn’t matter. We shared beliefs…
From the origins of the internet in 1990, the end of the 1990s saw the emergence of e-commerce and a plethora of payments services and commercial websites. Then not a great deal happened until the internet became social. Blog platforms like WordPress and Typepad emerged in 2003; Facebook launched in 2004; and YouTube a year…
Web 1.0 – the network begins As mentioned yesterday, almost half a century of developments in technology led to the launch of the web as we know it today, following Tim Berners-Lee’s paper detailing HTML and URLs. This was in 1990 and, consequently, the internet morphs almost every decade. This makes our decade – the…
The last chapter of ValueWeb talks about what comes after the third generation internet: the internet of value. This is the internet being built today, based upon shared ledgers, cloud, apps, APIs and analytics. Of course, the next generation is the internet of things. But what comes after that? There is an answer, but you…
We had a meeting of the Financial Services Club in Oslo last night, talking about the Payment Services Directive 2 (PSD2) and Open APIs (Application Program Interfaces). It was a fun meeting and covered the in’s and out’s of closed versus open APIs, the implications of allowing Trusted Third Parties (TTPs) access to the bank’s…
I’ve been presenting a summary of Digital Bank and ValueWeb for a few months now. It is the story of the origins of moneykind and, as many have now heard the story, I thought it’s about time to share this on the blog. If you have half an hour free, then you can watch the presentation. It’s been filmed…
Having covered four ages of moneykind: Barter Coins Paper Chips What could possibly be the fifth? When we are just at the start of the Internet of Things (IoT), and are building an Internet of Value (ValueWeb), how can we imagine something beyond this next ten year cycle? Well we can and we must, as…
The Fourth Age of Man: the Network Age Part of the reason for talking about the history of money in depth this week is as a backdrop to what is happening today. Money originated as a control mechanism for governments of Ancient Sumer to control farmers, based upon shared beliefs. It was then structured during…
The Third Age: The Industrial Revolution The use of money as a means of value exchange, alongside barter, lasted for hundreds of years or, to be more exact, about 4,700 years. During this time, beads, tokens, silver, gold and other commodities were used as money, as well as melted iron and other materials. Perhaps the…
The Second Age of Man: The Invention of Money I’ve blogged about money being invented for sex many times before but hey, it’s a good story, so I’m going to again. So man became civilized and dominant by being able to work in groups of hundreds. This was unique to homo sapiens form of communication, as…
