Not all alternative views of the financial system come from the bitcoin community, as active as it is evangelizing in its crusade for decentralized payment methods. From another point of view, some anthropologists, sociologists and thinkers warn of the risks of a cashless system, increasingly digitized, that would open the doors to social surveillance mechanisms, in public or private hands.
Brett Scott responds to that last profile. After spending his youth in South Africa, this Bachelor of Anthropology moved to London and began working in the financial sector in September 2008, the same month the economy faltered with the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers. After learning about the system from within, he crossed into the field of economic activism, collaborating with NGOs and writing in media such as The Guardian and Wired . In 2013 he published a kind of alternative guide to the financial system, Hacking the future of money (the Spanish edition, by Profit, is from 2019). The trial did not anticipate the explosion of cryptocurrencies and blockchain, but it did put a growing concern on the table: the progressive cornering of cash.
He seems to share with many of bitcoin's advocates an almost total amendment to the financial system, but he hardly talks about the cryptocurrency, nor does he defend its importance.
Bitcoin has been fascinating from a technological point of view, and has made people think about money, but it has failed to really change the financial system. It is not challenging in any fundamental way. Furthermore, crypto culture is toxic, highly individualistic, and hypercapitalist. They believe that the problem of the world is that there is not enough capitalism, and that a structure must be created so that the market between individuals develops more. At the same time, a part of me is interested in it, because I am interested in creating collaborative structures, and in that sense decentralized technologies can be very useful.
"In two years all the noise around 'blockchain' will disappear and only the really interesting projects will survive."
What future do you see for bitcoin?
Bitcoin will not disappear, it will survive, but it has structural limitations. I used to use it, but it is very impractical, because it is not integrated into the real economy. And the community that supports it has no intention of working in this way. It is in their best interest to leave it as a speculative asset. It is, and very good.
Do you think that blockchain technology can dramatically change the evolution of the financial sector?
The interesting thing with the blockchain scene is that you can only fool people for one season, so in two years with a little luck the noise will go away, all the bullshit will fade away and the really cool projects will survive. At the moment, around blockchain there are many ethereal projects.
What worries you is the total digitization of money. Imagine a cashless society. What repercussions would it have?
Huge. First, it would be a problem of financial inclusion: if you exclude cash from the system, you are excluding part of the population. And you open the door to systems not only of business manipulation and surveillance, but also of censorship: whoever controlled the system would not only have the ability to observe the population, but also to prevent them from doing certain things.
Is it realistic to think that cash will disappear?
I don't know if it's realistic. But it is clear that there is a structural attack against him. The question is whether that attack will succeed or not.
Who is behind that offensive and how does it work?
The payments industry, like Visa and Mastercard, is very active with its anti- cash propaganda campaigns . On the other hand, big tech companies also hate cash. They are wanting to end him; Companies like Amazon want to automate everything and tickets get in their way.
In their strategy, they tell us a recurring story for the technology industry. They tell us that they respond to a demand and that the power lies with us, ordinary citizens. And they have the will and the economic capacity to spread that narrative; they are perfectly aware that they make money from people's dependence on their technological systems.