The Secret Genius of Modern Life, BBC 2, BBC iPlayer, presenter Professor Hannah Fry, Series Producer, Eileen Inkson and Director James Howard.

1.1 Bank Card.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m001f1td/the-secret-genius-of-modern-life-series-1-1-bank-card

My dad never owned a bank card. I’m taking it for granted if he didn’t, my mum didn’t either. He got paid in cash, a brown envelope (not so) full of notes and coins. A slip of paper inside with the amount paid and tax deducted. The bank card seen off hard cash. With many banks closing, used mainly by elderly customers, elegies to the bank card is a bit like a fondness for phone boxes. Cash is no longer king. Neither are bank cards. But I love bite-sized programmes like this and would binge watch each episode.

Bank cards keep the score. The old trick in the book for economics – what money was or is? The Gold Standard was easy to understand. A precious metal with scarcity value. Banknotes were issued to ‘pay the bearer on demand’. Shysters who shaved gold or precious metals from coins devalued the common currency and faced the wrath of the state. In those days, you were either hanged or sent to Australia. Most convicts opted for hanging. With all the unrest in the world, it seemed the surer option.

Professor Fry visits Visa’s European Data Centre. They monitor how money flows and look for energy spikes. These show where the shysters are shaving the common currency. Much like when searching for artificial intelligence from other solar systems harvest sunlight, but criminals harvest data. Professor Fry is shown online reviews from the dark net of how good, or indeed bad, the criminal elements are. Five-star reviews paid in cryptocurrency.

Cryptocurrency doesn’t really exist. It does not have the backing of any one government, it cannot guarantee to pay on demand to the holder, yet it has bled into the money supply. A bit like the moron’s moron, the 52^nd President of the United States continually claiming he’d more wealth than he was worth—so he could borrow, or leverage, more—which is zero. A bit like saying he’d more rooms in Trump Tower, because nobody had got round to counting them.

The Bank Card has a lot to answer for. I’ve just loaded it with debt. Went off on a tangent.  I’ll be watching Professor Fry’s next programme. Worth a look.