科幻小说家曾相像过一种星系货币，以利于地球与“南门二”（离太阳系最近的恒星：4.2光年）之间的星际贸易。事实却与此背道而驰：各种专用货币遍地开花，其流通经手机以电子方式完成，而手机日益成为地球人人难以割舍的随身物品。
眼下，这一模式四处浮现，可谓未来学家说的“变化的微弱信号”[PDF]，即一代之后才能看清的技术革命先兆。
略加思索，就能意识到：金钱是一门技术。它不是自然世界的特征而是人造的工具、界定了我们行事的方式。它是明确的标准，如互联网协议、铁路交通用的仪表、汽油的辛烷值规格等等，却也不是一成不变的。
再者，像所有技术一样，金钱也揭示了“意外后果法则”。历史学家David Edgerton在其著作《过去的震荡：1900年以来技术与全球历史》（The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History Since 1900，2006年Profile Books出版）曾论述到，随着一种技术在某个社会中传布，其普及用途经常与其设计者的初衷相距甚远。对声称能高瞻远瞩新技术后果的人来说，这一事实不啻当头一棒。
今天，货币技术在奋力追赶着社会变化，这些变化大大改变了人们的交互方式，从而改变了金钱使用的方式、原因、时间。这些金融技术创新的意外后果，无法预料；我们只能说它们终将来临，并做一些理智的猜测。尽管如此，我相信，最终，我们所熟悉的货币将面目全非，这一革命至少会像一千年前发明纸币那样影响深远。
当然，历史曾有过货币技术创新的时代。回顾一下英格兰皇室收税记录用的木条“核对筹码”（split tally），1066年诺曼征服不久即开始使用，一直用到1826年才废止（我们英国佬可守旧了）。郡长根据税收评估课税，再把收到的税款交给国王。为了确保郡长和国王有据可依，税收评估被刻录在树枝上面，再将树枝一分为二，以便国王和郡长各持一份持久的评估记录。当“兑现筹码”时，“郡长携款和半条筹码前来，与国王的那半条核对”。
该技术行之有效。筹码小巧耐久（特别久，有的幸存到了今天）、易于储存、运输，浅显到文盲都能理解（那时绝大部分人是文盲），还很安全：郡长乃至国王都难以造假。
筹码很快就有了意想不到的应用。国王经常等不到税款到期，而是想立即得到现款（一般是为了和法国或苏格兰开仗）。故他会把其筹码的那半条打折出售。而买者则可在税款到期时拿到现金。这实际上是把那半条筹码做成了定期政府债券。筹码的市场快速显现。假如在英格兰南部某市的人持有北部约克市的筹码，他或者得亲自去收款、或者破费找他人代劳。结果一种本意是用来记录的货币技术，发展成了兴旺的市场。
筹码条：这些向英国国王纳税的凭据后来具有了货币和定期政府债券的功能。
手机就是新的筹码条。它的发展方式将难以预料，新技术的推动、社会需要变化的拉动，会塑造其结果。而我相信，结果将是革命性的改变。
在日本和韩国，手机用于支付已十年之久，该技术是当地手机的标准功能。今年三月，日本用户六人中有一人曾在商店以手机购物。人们还用该系统付账单和交通费；企业通过它来向顾客发送忠诚奖励。起初，零售商接受新技术者寥寥，然而，一旦约有三分之一的顾客使用，就开始腾飞了，带来了我们技术人士所喜爱的“曲棍球棒形”采用曲线。
非洲的发展更令人震惊。肯尼亚现在有了全世界最广阔的手机支付体系：M-Pesa 。（我应该披露：我的雇主Consult Hyperion为M-Pesa项目提供了收费的专业服务。）该方案于2007年推出，推出者并非银行而是肯尼亚最大的移动运营商Safaricom公司，并得到英国国际发展署的支持。该系统用户有1,500万人，可用手机存款、通过POS机在全国28,000个参与商店中购物。用户还可以通过基于手机短信的应用程序转账。当想购物时，用户只需发短信把钱转给个人、商店、或参与该系统的银行；付款人的账户被扣款、收款方得到进款。
肯尼亚国内生产总值（GDP）的三分之一流通于M-Pesa系统；一系列新业务涌现，都是创建人未曾预见的。农场主购买保险把牲畜带到市场，酒吧无现金运营（避免了抢劫），商店用该系统来做“夜间保险柜”，只能通过手机存取的储蓄账户等等，都是“新筹码条”才能带来的成果。
该项目一鸣惊人，有个原因：该国很多人没有信用卡和银行账户。给穷乡僻壤的亲戚汇款，也许得花钱雇信差，交易昂贵。M-Pesa服务的成长即是明证：2007年推出一年内获得了五百万订户，超过了该国43家商业银行客户的总数。M-Pesa目前正在被复制于坦桑尼亚、乌干达和其他国家。
其他各国也起步了。在英国，金融行业的协调机构“支付协会”（ the Payments Council）由政府法令成立于2007年，已经开始建造移动支付的全国基础架构。在法国，移动通讯运营商和银行协作以推出一个近场移动支付系统，通过带芯片的装置在靠近读卡器时转账。同期在德国，移动通讯运营商决定不管银行而独立运作。在美国，谷歌公司和Sprint运营商与万事达卡合作推出了“谷歌钱包”，而电信公司AT&T、Verizon和其他合作商则在规划一个竞争系统，名为“伊希斯移动钱包”（Isis Mobile Wallet），尽管美国市场相当难啃（参阅本期文章：Phone-y Money）。其他移动货币方案正在孵化过程中：例如在墨西哥、俄罗斯、越南等国。
所有这些活动使无现金社会再度成为话题。这是由于无法回避的事实：用现金太昂贵。例如，一项研究表明：在美国，维护一个现金体系的成本是GDP的百分之一，包括：印制新钞、旧币回笼、武装运钞、提款机入钞等等。这些研究还发现，现金交易的边际成本约是借记卡交易成本的两倍。
现金的间接成本也巨大。威斯康辛大学麦迪逊分校的Edgar L Feige、佛罗里达州Jacksonville大学的Richard Cebula在2011年一项研究[PDF]中发现：美国有百分之18或19的应报税总收入没有报给联邦税务局，逃税约5,000亿美元。司法部在2008年估算，逃税总额约五分之一是秘密离岸银行账户造成的，而其余百分之八十来自瞒报的现金。
有若干国家已经认识到需要摆脱现金。在荷兰有无现金商业街，许多超市有“仅限现金”的收款台但不是全日开放。在瑞典，政府与工会协作已在着手减少现金的流通量。工会力图使商店、银行无现金是由于其会员在遇到抢劫时受毒打、枪击；而政府则是想减少警察的工作负担。
M-Pesa系统：肯尼亚这一简单但高效的支付系统基于短信息功能。如此前很多货币技术一样，该系统的使用方式远远超出了其原创者的想像，例如：店铺现金夜间保管、为牲畜购买保险等。
这就是手机替代现金的诱人之处。使之能够实现的技术终于来到了，其落地生根是由于商业推动（即现金成本太高）和社会推动（对穷人来说使用现金昂贵得不成比例）业已就绪。就像信用卡和互联网便于我们付款给商户，手机将很快令我们便于相互支付。
那让我们假设手机将占上风，不出几年，我们就能用手机在沃尔玛购物、给小时工付款、给侄女汇款。在这个世界，在美元、欧元、常旅客里程、Facebook积分、谷歌币和任何其他形式的货币之间转账，仅需通过手机的下拉菜单即可完成。引入新货币的成本变得微乎其微，以至于谁都能够做到。换言之，未来的货币将不会是科幻小说中的统一星系币（我们已经明白了，连让德国和希腊使用单一货币都做不到，遑论“木卫三”和“半人马座伽马星”了）。相反，我们能期待不仅成百、而是上千、乃至百万个币种。尽管监管部门也许会反对，但阻挡不了这一潮流。
读者想必会觉得这荒诞不稽，就像当年祖先对纸币的感觉那样，但其实不然。钱包里装着上百种货币、售饮料机有成百个投币孔，当然是弱智。然而，根据手机“钱包”里的现有币种和当时的市场状况，手机和饮料机将能在零点几秒钟内商定出汇率。
我也不愿意携带成百张形形色色的信用卡、会员卡，但我的手机能携带无数种。我一进入星巴克，手机会运行星巴克小程序，装入我的账户，一般不用细节来烦我。当我走到隔壁Target商店时，手机则会启动该店的小程序、装入相应的购物卡，完成业务。
谁将乐于发行这些新货币呢？首先是企业。远在1994年，当Edward de Bono写出《IBM元：Target币推广使用建议书》（The IBM Dollar: A Proposal for the Wider Use of “Target” Currencies）时，他期待着“比尔·盖茨的后继者将令格林斯潘的继任人失业”时代的来临，其论点是：公司发钞比发股效率更好。即使我只有微软的“微钞”、你只有三星的“星币”，又有什么关系呢？手机能替我们把它搞定。
其他显而易见的发钞者，将是为一种货币构成自然领域的团体，由地区、政治管辖、某种活动参与等来划分。在伦敦南区，已经有了“布里克斯顿镑”（Brixton Pound，布里克斯顿是伦敦南部的一个区），它是由商家管理的电子货币，可兑换普通的英镑。其支持者说该币培养了当地企业；反对者则说它给贸易增加了不正规的障碍。无论如何，它显示了地区对货币一定程度的控制。
货币总体供应的效果难以确定。然而，我看不出该体系需要一个中央当局从事日终账务清算。我认为各种货币将有许多不同的结算交易所。
这些局部货币将遵循已有十年历史的虚拟货币的铸造方式，如各种在线游戏虚拟币、Facebook积分、各种促销币，包括一些将很快就要变成可转账的币种，其方式与今天的常旅客里程不同。它们将合并、崛起，形成全套的专用币种，给予用户更多的支付方式、使贸易效率更高。某些币种特别利于交易，某些则利于经济稳定，也许有些只是好玩。但从长远来看，我们会获益。
手机将永远改变货币。其起步于提供更便捷的交换方式，但这样将触发新的货币秩序。那不是坏事，而是进步。
作者简介
David G.W. Birch是Consult Hyperion公司的董事，该公司专注于电子交易安全。他在伦敦组织年度 “数字货币论坛”已有15年，该论坛探讨交易的历史和未来。当一名英国记者告诉他：她总以为英镑是由一堆存在地下室的黄金做后盾的时候，他首次意识到大众对货币知之甚少。他说：“当时我忍不住笑了”。
Science-fiction writers once imagined a galactic currency that would grease the wheels of commerce from here to Alpha Centauri. In fact, however, we are tending in precisely the other direction, toward a burgeoning number of ever more specialized currencies. These will circulate electronically, by means of the mobile phones that are increasingly part of the dress of every person on the planet.
Seemingly everywhere you look, you can see the emergence of this pattern in what futurologists call the weak signals [PDF] of change. These are the changes that will be seen, a generation from now, to have foreshadowed a technological revolution.
That money is a technology is obvious, once you look at it. It is not a feature of the natural world but rather a constructed tool, one that defines a way of doing things. It is a clearly specified standard, like the Internet Protocol, the gauges used in rail transport, or the octane specifications of gasoline. And it can change.
What’s more, like all technologies, money exhibits the law of unintended consequences. The historian David Edgerton wrote in The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History Since 1900 (Profile Books, 2006) that as a technology moves through a culture, its downstream uses are often very different from what its inventors had imagined. This fact stands squarely in the way of anyone who would claim to see just where a new technology will take us.
Today, the technology of money is racing to catch up to social changes that have radically altered how people interact and therefore how, why, and when they use money. It’s impossible to say what the unintended consequences of these innovations in financial technology will be; we can only note that they will come, and make some intelligent guesses. I believe, though, that in the end, money as we know it will be turned on its head, and this revolution will be at least as profound as the introduction of paper money a millennium ago.
Of course, society has been through times of innovation in monetary technology before. Consider the “split tally,” a wooden stick used to record royal taxes in England. Tallies came into use shortly after the Norman invasion of 1066 and were not withdrawn until 1826 (we Brits are a conservative bunch). The sheriff would collect the taxes based on tax assessments and then remit the collected cash to the king. To ensure that both the sheriff and the king knew where they stood, the tax assessment was recorded by cutting notches in a wooden twig. The twig was then split, so that the king and the sheriff each had a durable record of the assessment. When it was time to “tally up,” the sheriff would show up with the cash and his half of the tally to be reckoned against the king’s half.
The technology worked well. The sticks were small and long-lasting (very long—some of them still exist), they were easy to store and transport, and they were easily understood by those who couldn’t read (which was almost everyone, in the early days). They were also secure: Neither the sheriff nor even the king could forge one half of the stick without having the other half.
The tally was soon finding unforeseen uses. The king often couldn’t wait until taxes fell due; he wanted his cash as soon as possible (generally for wars with the French or the Scots). So he would sell his half of the stick at a discount. The buyer could then get the cash when the taxes fell due. This made that half of the tally stick, in effect, a fixed-term government bond. The market for tallies evolved quickly. Say someone in Bristol held a tally for taxes due in York; to collect the payment, he’d either have to travel to York or find someone else who would do the job for him, for an appropriate discount. Thus a money technology intended only for record keeping evolved into a thriving market.
TALLY STICKS: These symbols of tax obligations to English kings later functioned as money and as a sort of fixed-term government bond. Click on image to enlarge.
The mobile phone is the new tally stick. It will evolve in unforeseen ways, and both the push exerted by the new technology and the pull exerted by society’s changing needs will shape the outcome. And the result, I believe, will be revolutionary change.
In Japan and Korea [PDF], mobile phones have been used for payments for a decade, and the technology is now a standard feature there in handsets. In March, one out of six Japanese users bought something in a shop using a mobile. People also use the system to pay bills and transit fares; businesses use it to funnel loyalty rewards to customers. At first, the number of retailers accepting the new technology remained flat; once about a third of consumers were using it, though, things started to take off, producing the “hockey stick” adoption curve that we technologists love.
What’s happening in Africa is even more astonishing. Kenya is now home to the world’s most expansive mobile payments scheme, M-Pesa [PDF]. (I should disclose that my employer, Consult Hyperion, provided paid professional services for the M-Pesa project.) It was launched in 2007—not by a bank but by the country’s biggest mobile operator, Safaricom, with support from the United Kingdom’s Department for International Development. The system’s nearly 15 million users can use their mobile phones to deposit cash into their accounts, using as a point of deposit any of the 28 000 shops around the country that participate. Users can then move their deposited money about with an application built on top of the text-messaging function of their phones. When they want to buy something, they just text the money to another person, shop, or bank that is also in the system; money is then debited from the payer’s account and credited to that entity’s account.
A third of Kenya’s gross domestic product now flows through M-Pesa, and an amazing range of new businesses have sprung up to use it, none of which were envisaged by its founders. Farmers buying insurance to take animals to market, bars that operate cash free (and therefore robbery free), shops that use it as a kind of “night safe,” savings accounts that can be accessed only from online—all these have been made possible by the new tally stick.
One reason it has taken off so splendidly is that so many people in Kenya lack credit cards and bank accounts. To send cash to a relative in a far-off village, you might have to pay a courier to take it there—for a tremendously high transaction cost. The proof was in the service’s growth: Within a year of its launch in 2007 it had 5 million subscribers, more than all 43 of Kenya’s commercial banks put together. The M-Pesa network is now being replicated in Tanzania, Uganda, and other countries.
The rest of the world is starting to move. In the U.K., the Payments Council—a coordinating body for the financial industry, set up in 2007 by government order—has begun working on a national mobile payment infrastructure. In France, mobile phone operators and banks have gotten together to launch a system for mobile proximity payments, which lets a chip-bearing platform transfer money when held close to the reader. In Germany, meanwhile, the mobile phone operators have decided to ignore the banks and go it alone. In the United States, Google is working with Sprint and MasterCard to launch Google Wallet, while AT&T, Verizon, and their partners are planning a rival called Isis Mobile Wallet (although the U.S. market is a tough one—see “Phone-y Money,” in this issue). Other mobile money schemes are hatching in Mexico, Russia, Vietnam, and elsewhere.
All this activity has people once again talking about a cashless society. Because let’s face it: Cash is expensive. In the United States, for instance, studies indicate that maintaining a cash system—including printing new bills, recycling old ones, moving them about in armored trucks, using them to replenish automatic cash machines—costs the country about 1 percent of GDP. Those studies also show that the marginal cost of a cash transaction is around double that of a debit-card transaction.
Cash’s indirect costs are huge, too. In a 2011 study [PDF], Edgar L. Feige of the University of Wisconsin, in Madison, and Richard Cebula of Jacksonville University, in Florida, found that in the United States 18 to 19 percent of total reportable income is hidden from federal tax men, a shortfall of about US $500 billion. The Justice Department estimated in 2008 that secret offshore bank accounts were responsible for about one-fifth of the tax gap, suggesting that the remaining 80 percent is attributable to unreported cash.
The need to get beyond cash has been recognized in a number of countries. In the Netherlands, there are commercial streets that are cash free, and many supermarkets have cash-only lanes that are open for just part of the day. In Sweden the government and labor unions have come together to start reducing the amount of cash in circulation. The labor unions want to remove cash from shops and banks because it is their members who get beaten and shot in robberies; the government wants to reduce the burden of police work.
M-PESA SYSTEM: This simple but effective payments system in Kenya is based on the function that underlies text messaging. Like many earlier technologies of money, M-Pesa is being used in ways its originators never dreamed of—for instance, to safeguard a shopkeeper’s cash overnight and to buy insurance for livestock.
Thus the allure of the mobile phone as an alternative to cash. The enabling technology has finally arrived, and it’s taking root because the business drivers (that is, the high cost of cash) and the social drivers (cash’s disproportionate cost to the poor) were already there. And just as the plastic card and the Web made it easy for us to pay merchants, the mobile phone will soon make it easy for us to pay each other.
So let's assume that the mobile phone will take over and that in a few years’ time, you’ll be able to pay Walmart or your window cleaner or your niece with your mobile phone. In this world, switching among dollars and euros and frequent-flier miles and Facebook Credits and Google Bucks and any other form of money will be just a matter of choosing from a menu on the phone. The cost of introducing new currencies will collapse—anyone will be able to do it. The future of money, in other words, won’t be that single galactic currency of science fiction. (We already know that, because we can’t even make a single currency work between Germany and Greece, let alone Ganymede and Gamma Centauri.) Instead, we can look forward not merely to hundreds but thousands or even millions of currencies. And though regulators may oppose the trend, they can’t hold it back.
That must sound as crazy to you as the idea of paper money once did to your ancestors, but it really isn’t. Trying to imagine a wallet with a hundred currencies in it and a Coke machine with a hundred slots for them is, of course, nuts. But based on the available currencies in your mobile “wallet” and prevailing market conditions, your phone and the Coke machine will be able to negotiate an exchange rate in a fraction of a second.
Likewise, I don’t want to carry around a hundred different retailer credit and loyalty cards, but my phone can hold a zillion. So when I go to Starbucks, my phone will select my Starbucks app, load up my Starbucks account, and generally not bother me about the details. When I walk next door into Target, my phone will select my Target app, fire up my Target card, and get down to business.
Who will want to issue these new currencies? Corporations, for starters. When Edward de Bono wrote The IBM Dollar: A Proposal for the Wider Use of “Target” Currencies back in 1994, he looked forward to a time when “the successors to Bill Gates will have put the successors to Alan Greenspan out of business,” arguing that it would be more efficient for companies to issue money than equity. Even if all I’ve got is Microsoft Moola, and you want to get paid in Samsung Shekels, who cares? Our phones can sort it out for us.
Other obvious money-issuing entities will be communities that constitute a natural domain for a kind of money—communities defined by region, political jurisdiction, or participation in some activity. In South London we already have the Brixton Pound, a merchant-managed e-currency that’s exchangeable for regular pounds. Proponents say it fosters local business; detractors say it puts up an informal barrier to trade. In either case, it demonstrates a degree of local control over money.
The effects on the total supply of money are hard to determine. However, I see no reason why this system would require a central authority to settle up accounts at the end of the day. I would imagine that there will instead be lots of different exchanges settling among different types of currencies.
Such local currencies will follow the decadelong minting of virtual money in various online games, Facebook Credits, and a host of promotions—including some that will no doubt soon become transferable in a way that today’s frequent-flier miles are not. These will merge and surge, forming a panoply of private currencies that will give users more ways to pay for things and thus make trade more efficient. Some currencies will excel for transactional purposes, others for economic stability, and perhaps some will just be fun. But in the long term, we will be better off.
The mobile phone will change money forever. It will start by providing a convenient means of exchange, but in so doing it will trigger a new monetary order. That’s not a bad thing. It’s progress.
This article originally appeared in print as "Let a Thousand Currencies Bloom."
About the Author
David G.W. Birch is a director of Consult Hyperion, which specializes in secure electronic transactions. For 15 years he has organized the annual Digital Money Forum, in London, which explores the history and future of transactions. He first realized how little the public understood about money when a British journalist told him she’d always thought the pound was backed by a pile of gold in a basement. “I had to laugh,” he says.
