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Brett Scott

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Cloudmoney: Cash, Cards, Crypto and the War for our Wallets Kindle Edition

by Brett Scott (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

4.4 73 ratings

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Who really benefits from a cashless society?

Many of us rarely use cash these days. And the reach of corporations into our lives via cards and apps has never been greater. But what we're told is inevitable is actually the work of powerful interests: the great battle of our time is for ownership of the digital footprints that make up our lives.

Cloudmoney tells a revelatory story about the fusion of big finance and tech, which requires physical cash to be replaced by digital money or 'cloudmoney'. Diving beneath the surface of the global financial system, Brett Scott uncovers a long-established lobbying infrastructure waging a covert war on cash under the banner of progress but at the cost of our privacy, politics and individual freedom.

'A wonderfully revolutionary text' YANIS VAROUFAKIS

'Scott has struck an important vein that is vital in a digital age' FINANCIAL TIMES

'Brilliant, fascinating and utterly accessible' KATE RAWORTH, author of Doughnut Economics

Editorial Reviews

Review

"In a book that is simultaneously irreverent, hard-hitting, and entertaining, Brett Scott blows apart conventional myths about cash, digital money, and crypto, and brilliantly shows us what's at stake in the coming battles for the soul of money." --Stephanie Kelton, New York Times bestselling author

About the Author

BRETT SCOTT is an economic anthropologist, financial activist, and former broker. In 2013 he published The Heretic's Guide to Global Finance: Hacking the Future of Money, and since then has spoken at hundreds of events across the globe and has appeared across international media, including BBC World News and Sky News. He has written extensively on financial reform, digital finance, alternative currency, blockchain technology, and the cashless society for publications like the Guardian, New Scientist, Huffington Post, Wired, and CNN.com, and also publishes the Altered States of Monetary Consciousness newsletter. He has worked on financial reform campaigns and alternative currency systems with a wide range of groups and is a Senior Fellow of the Finance Innovation Lab (UK). He lives in Berlin.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B09N6QP4NY
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Vintage Digital (May 19, 2022)
Publication date ‏ : ‎ May 19, 2022
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 7363 KB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
Print length ‏ : ‎ 285 pages

Best Sellers Rank: #1,954,401 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #282 in Financial Engineering (Kindle Store)
- #501 in Free Enterprise
- #508 in International Economics (Kindle Store)

Customer Reviews:
4.4 73 ratings

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4.4 out of 5

73 global ratings

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Crypto Hipster

An amazing stance in the defense of cash

Reviewed in the United States on September 13, 2022

Verified Purchase

This is an amazing book in the defense of the cash system. In a world where FinTech and Big Tech giants are jockeying for positioning for who controls the payment rails and bins, and our personal data, the cash system must be preserved.

Being in crypto for five years, I have a biased toward digital cash. But not toward centrally bank controlled digital cash. Why? It’s a matter of surveillance and privacy. And of sovereignty. Considering these views, this book serves as a wonderful defense of a world where corporations and governments are held in check from overstepping their boundaries.

3 people found this helpful

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Will Szal

Don't care about the demise of cash? Read this!

Reviewed in the United States on August 9, 2023

For a long time the crypto space has been pointing out, "if you think crypto should be illegal, you must not understand what cash is like." In other words, far more illegal activity is facilitated through cash than crypto. Unfortunately, it looks that rather than the world moving in the direction of embracing both, things are sliding towards rejecting both.

I came into this book knowing a bit about the downsides of centralized digital payment technologies, but have come out the other side a full-on cash evangelist.

Scott is a great writer. The book is full of interesting stories.

Scott points out: if you're concerned about fraud, traditional banks are, by far, the largest facilitators of financial fraud; cash and crypto don't come anywhere close. What about Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs)? One challenge there is that essentially all business loans are made by private banks, so moving away towards CBDC could bankrupt the economy.

As decades of cyberattacks have made clear: when you create massive, centralized, automated systems, you're enables massive fraud. Cash exploits aren't scaleable, so damage is always limited. As the Chinese Communist Party's centralization of digital payments illustrates, when a centralized institution controls individual payments, entire classes of people can be removed from the economy with a click of a button, facilitating chilling "Black Mirror" reenactments.

It turns out that cash isn't broken. If you're looking for something to fix, maybe try digital payments. Unfortunately, the fight is asymmetrical against cash; there are massive industries aligned against cash, and no big interests that are pro cash.

Helpful

Paul

Brilliant economic anthropological analysis.

Reviewed in the United States on July 29, 2022

Brett Scott is an excellent writer and presents a difficult and complex topic with humor, compassion, and a well-informed world view that enables him to see and convey the degree to which corporate interests transcend government and personal interests today, likely to our ultimate detriment. Although Big Tech and Big Finance push digitization of money and a cashless society as salvific, this view is clearly naive. Mr. Scott well makes the case that we have entered an era in which money, as fickle a commodity as ever, is more critical than ever to individual and institutional survival and that despite the convenience of digitization, the problems that arise need to be considered more closely before we embrace a cashless society. I for one, will think more carefully about what is going on behind the scenes the next time I do something as simple and everyday as withdraw government backed cash from an ATM through a series of bank backed transactions and what are the consequences once these ATMs are eliminated as no longer needed.

I found it very helpful first to listen to the text on Audible, which is excellently narrated by Coleman Pedigo, then to read the text, and have found friends extraordinarily interested in this work who are in banking, investment, wealth advisory roles, religion and economics.

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Marcus Davis Jr

We all need this book, like now!

Reviewed in the United States on August 26, 2022

This book opened my eyes like never before. It put a description to something I think we’ve all subconsciously felt but couldn’t articulate. The war on cash is real, and we need to understand why. The author does an amazing job connecting all the dots. Two thumbs up!!

Helpful

Holger

Suspicions and grievances instead of facts

Reviewed in the United States on March 9, 2023

"Cloud Money" tells people with fears of overreach and powerlessness: You're not alone. The author has identified "cash" as worthy of preservation, threatened by an ominous _them_. _They_ never bodes well for journalism.

_They_ encompass credit card companies, banks, central banks, big tech. Rather than opposing a new standard being adopted for profit reasons and accepted for convenience, the book goes to great lengths to imply darker motives, such as disdain for the poor up and outright racism founded in colonial roots.

The arguments are one-sided and veer into personal preferences and anecdotes. See this typical quote, criticizing all financial inclusion initiatives without questioning why they'd support digital payments - arguments replaced by an unrelated grievance and insinuating it's the norm:

<blockquote>"Almost all financial inclusion initiatives present digital technology as a great leap forward, that will enable unbanned to get banked. Not mentioned, however, is that the economic risk-return equation is only half of a bigger equation: while banks may not like poor people unless they can dealing with them profitable, poor people had no practical reason to like banks either. One part of the reason is practical: Historically, the average size of their transaction was so small as to make writing a cheque or requesting bank transfers an unnecessary or even embarrassing process, especially in situations where they might only buy essential goods within a small radius from where they live. Another part is political: I was a boy at the tail end of the apartheid regime in South Africa, notorious for its discrimination. At this time, my parents opened a special children's account for me at the "Standard Bank", one of the country's most prominent financial institutions. I remember the branches full of white people, while the black people stood outside. Gradually, as South Africa moved into its post-Apartheid phase, the number of black customers increased. But those who were illiterate were treated with condescension. For an elderly Zulu man, who had spent his formative years as a laborer for a South African mining corporation, there was no reason to feel trusting towards financial institutions. This same pattern is found the world over."</blockquote>

One star for good explanations - Scott is a gifted user of metaphors. Unfortunately, he uses them neither objectively nor constructively.

By glazing over why the less fortunate and unbanked _choose_ digital payment systems (or declaring that they are being hoodwinked by "the system"), the book ultimately loses all justification.

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Top reviews from other countries

Prabhjeet Singh

Bad quality. Old and Used book.

Reviewed in India on August 12, 2023

Verified Purchase

Bad quality . It appears to be an old , used book . Title page and back page are wrinkled and folded at ends

Jeff Kaye

How Fintechs / Crypto are harvesting consumers

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on June 23, 2022

Verified Purchase

Brett Scott has written a timely and absorbing book on money, how it is being used by banks and fintech organisations to harvest the consumer and why cash seems to be the only obstacle in their drive for supremacy.

This is a well-written work that excellently describes the numerous forms of digital 'money', how the banks (including Central Banks) are working to make cash obsolete and why they are doing so.

I particularly liked the chapters on cryptos (I don't like the term crypto currencies as they are not) and blockchain developers. It properly shows cryptos are just numbers but hyped beyond reality by those (mainly libertarians) who wish to substitute their agenda and power structures for the nation state and their fiat currencies.

It is a book I can recommend to anyone interested in how the world is fast becoming dominated by the massive corporations from USA to China that exploit the power of the internet and collectivisation of information for massive profit and control over individuals that become mere fodder.

It is not a heartening book - reality is not that heartening in this context. Cash appears doomed and wishful thoughts do not abound as the power of the corporation in advanced nations seems too strong.

I learned a lot from David Graeber's book - Debt: The first 5000 years - and it is good to see him so revered by Brett.

10 people found this helpful

Rayjay

Cash, cash, cash…Digital?

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on December 30, 2022

Verified Purchase

A mirror to our future? A good book for all the good people. For all the people that much the folding stuff rather than the virtual stuff.