This author explains our obsession with cryptocurrency

What’s cash? Why do we want it?

These are a few of the huge questions author Frederick Kaufman explores in his ebook “The Money Plot: A History of Currency’s Power to Enchant, Control, and Manipulate,” which was revealed within the thick of the pandemic.

Kaufman, a journalism and English professor, is occupied with what we venture onto cash, from our needs of abundance and freedom to — most of all — security and safety.

The ebook comes at a time when our most elementary understandings of cash are being challenged. (Once I hear the phrase, I nonetheless image money, not bitcoin. What does one even image after they image bitcoin?)

One option to get an concept of what is coming subsequent is to look again. And in studying Kaufman’s ebook, which traces the historical past of cash, you see how bitcoin just isn’t all that totally different from the beads used as foreign money 40,000 years in the past.

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I just lately interviewed Kaufman about his new ebook. (Disclosure: I used to be enrolled in one in every of his programs on the Craig Newmark Graduate Faculty of Journalism at CUNY in 2017.)

The next change has been condensed and edited for readability.

Annie Nova: What’s the largest manner cash has modified?

FK: Primitive cash could be very materials: It is a feather, it is a bead. Over time, it turns into very metaphorical — a coin, paper cash. After which lastly, in fact, there’s little or no materials cash on the earth. Solely about 5% to 10% of cash on the earth is in any materials kind. After which one would possibly say the tip recreation is cryptocurrency. It has all of the attributes of primitive cash, it is our safety, besides it has no materials parallel.

AN: Why do we glance to cash for safety?

FK: Within the Center Ages, the Christians begin defining the longer term, and that is going to be doomsday, and the apocalypse. All the things is counting all the way down to that. This transforms business tradition into this deal with expiration dates, and take into consideration cash: It is all about expiration dates. It is about while you receives a commission. It is when your quarterly report is due. It is all of retirement financial savings. And a mortgage, in fact, relies on, when does it expire? We’re securitizing the longer term and gaining some management over it. That is the essence of what cash is.

AN: There is a price to this, nonetheless, proper? A mortgage is safety, but it surely’s additionally 30 years of funds.

FK: It is one of many ironies of cash. We create this fiction after which we change into captive to it.

AN: Is it a coincidence that we have change into a lot extra occupied with cryptocurrencies throughout a pandemic?

FK: If you happen to look again on the historical past of apocalyptic moments, folks fly towards safety. And that is what cash is. Some folks see their safety blanket as gold, some see it as crypto. Some see it as money. We additionally see elevated money holdings through the pandemic. All this means the true essence of cash: safety, ensuring we will proceed in our standing, ensuring the narratives we’ve got about ourselves can proceed into the longer term.

AN: What occurs when folks’s tales get disrupted?

FK: If you happen to actually look at, why do you may have a retirement account? Why are you working? Why are you utilizing the cash the best way you are utilizing it? It is since you’re defining a story of what you need to be sooner or later, and when that is reduce off due to a scarcity of cash, that is traumatic. And we’re seeing this nation undergo an incredible interval of trauma proper now.

AN: What do cryptocurrencies have in frequent with the primitive types of cash you write about?

FK: Primitive cash was extra of a talisman than a retailer of worth or a medium of change. The rings and beads had magical powers to deliver the bearer protected into no matter lay forward. Likewise, cryptos play the position of primitive amulets, significantly those who haven’t any worth in any respect, like dogecoin, but nonetheless promise to ship luck. It is attention-grabbing so as to add that when the Europeans first got here to settle, they forgot to deliver sufficient cash. So, very like those that mine bitcoin, they began to fabricate their very own wampum.

AN: Why do you assume there’s a lot skepticism about cryptocurrencies?

FK: Cash is a narrative all of us imagine. Wall Avenue has been telling that story, and making an attempt to foretell the way it ends earlier than the remainder of us know the ending. After all the bankers will change into uncomfortable when a brand new set of shamans and soothsayers inform a brand new story with a brand new ending.