“We are engaged in a fight for our lives over the design features of theoretical currencies”

This month, it’s not all about the money, but rather the systems and rules that govern the movement, storage, reporting and even taxation of money. We’ve all seen the headlines about disputes between Visa, Mastercard and Amazon: these veer from “Minor disruption expected” to “Half the UK will have to switch credit cards to use Amazon”, and all seem to result in a non-event that makes everyone less interested the next time the subject emerges.

After some of the conversations I’ve had this month, we ought to pay more attention to this subject. This isn’t just an argument about how the credit-card processors manage payments for vendors so big they define their own markets and acceptable procedures: it’s an argument about how payments can be handled at all scales, from the new strain imposed by contactless payments for peppercorn values, through to the weird world of cryptocurrencies, NFTs and the blockchain. It’s why we are currently engaged in what might well be a fight for our lives, over eccentric design features of theoretical currencies suddenly made real.

Creatives and NFTs

Let’s start with a seemingly easy question: what is an NFT? It’s a question this magazine spent four pages answering last month and one that has kept my more creative friends busy, too. In particular, towards the quieter times at the end of lockdown, as they tried to figure out if their particular speciality had fared well or badly in the role and employment shuffle that followed the end