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(Note: This is based on a talk I first gave at London Bitcoin Expo 2013 ) Imagine a scenario 10 years from now in which Bitcoin has managed to establish itself as an important global currency, supported by a myriad of Bitcoin companies, trade associations, and educational institutions. Now imagine the board meetings of those organisations. What will their demographic breakdown be? Will it resemble  this , or this , or this ? It's no secret that the directorships of large FTSE 100 or S&P 500 companies are overwhelmingly dominated by men, and white men at that. This is not just due to random chance, or men's innate brilliance. This is due to our society having a lingering, systematic male bias built upon hundreds of years in which men have had the most access to job opportunities, educational opportunities, political rights, and (perhaps most importantly) cultural  encouragement  to actually seek those positions. This has helped men build capital, skills and to normalis...

I originally wrote this article for  Transition Free Press Edition 4 . It's published under a Creative Commons licence (see side panel for details) Finance, even in its most high-tech formulations, is rooted in ecological systems. A high-frequency trading hedge fund, for example, relies on electricity created by burning fossillised organic matter. It relies on employees, surviving via agricultural systems. It trades in company shares, given value by the actions of those companies’ employees using assets (like computers and telecommunications systems) that are all dependent (at some level) on mining, forestry, and other extractive industries. The financial system has been a net drain on ecological systems though. Finance involves steering economic energy – symbolised in money – in an attempt to generate a yield over time. For example, investors may steer money via financial instruments like shares and bonds into economic activities, and attempt to extract returns in the form of divi...

AHOY, THERE BE A CLOSED SYSTEM TO OPEN This is an article about Open Source Finance. It's an idea I first sketched out at a  talk  I gave at the  Open Data Institute  in London. By 'Open Source Finance', I don't just mean open source software programmes. Rather, I'm referring to something much deeper and broader. It's a way of framing an overall change we might want to see in the financial system. To illustrate this, I set up an analogy between computer systems and economic systems, and I then explore what financial 'code' might be. I then sketch out the five pillars that could underpin an open finance movement. Computer systems as economies Computer systems are great metaphors for economic systems. That's because, in a sense, a computer is a microcosm of our economy, albeit one that is a lot more predictable and controllable. Economies, at some basic level, are based upon people using energy to extract useful stuff from the earth, using tools, proce...

The Automatic Teller Machine is one the primary interfaces we have with the banking system. It's a machine of convenience, replicating what a human bank teller used to do. They're often placed next to physical bank branches, reinforcing the widespread notion that the money coming out of the wall somehow came from 'inside' the bank. Given that the majority of our money is in fact electronic, and stored in a bank's datacentre-based IT system, nowhere remotely close to the ATM, this is something of an illusion. Indeed, the ATM  can echo and reinforce much of the disconnection implicit in the broader banking system. That said, the fact that people are constantly using ATMs makes them great venues for symbolic pranking. Maybe one could call it, like the situationists did,  detournment   - the art of throwing people's minds into an unexpected detour whilst they trudge through otherwise unthinking everyday practice. The hope of such a situationist prankster is to make ...

I published an epic 4200 word article on alternative currency in Aeon magazine. Take a read if you're having a lazy weekend afternoon and wish to casually reflect on the nature of economic reality. I believe that coming to basic grips with money itself is a good foundation for making further explorations into the financial system, and economic systems more generally. As I say in the article: "The financial system exists, above all, to mediate flows of money, not to question what money is. Investment banks create financial instruments that steer money from one place to another, with built-in sub-conduits to siphon it back... To draw an analogy with computer coding, we might say that financial instruments are analogous to ‘high-level’ programming languages such as Java or Ruby: they let you string commands together in order to perform certain actions. You want to get resources from A to B over time? Well, we can program a financial instrument to do that for you...  By contrast,...

PICK A CARD A few months ago I ran a campaign to seedfund a  London School of Financial Activism on the crowdfunding site Indiegogo. That was a great success (here's a post I wrote about some crowdfunding tips I learned from the campaign). Then my book got released, which has since swallowed up much of my time, but now I've hired some interns  (that I'm paying in alternative currencies like bitcoin, barter and Brixton Pounds), so I've now got more space to refocus back on developing the School. I've met some awesome people over the last few months, exchanging ideas over Skype with campaigners, entrepreneurs and academics in Oz, Hong Kong, China, USA, Germany, South Africa and various other places, all informing my designs for finance campaigning courses. In the mean time though, I wanted to share some photos of the crowdfunding rewards that came with the Indiegogo campaign, and one short video which shows one of the reward's magical secret. (More photos can b...