The true value of cryptocurrency is freedom

Picture a village. It has a grocery shop and a pub. A little down the road you can find a cobbler and a hardware store. A factory manufactures parts for some large concern in a nearby city and local farmers supply their produce to the villagers. There are a dozen taxi drivers, a priest, a few doctors, teachers, nannies and so on. Crucially, there is also a shared idea of what constitutes the good life, a common culture that enables the inhabitants to trust each other – perhaps the most fundamental and most overlooked component of a properly functioning economy. We are looking, in short, at that increasingly endangered social construct: a community.

Now the village also has a bank. Once, a man rather like Captain Mainwaring was its manager and he was known and respected in the community. Like the neighbourhood policeman who had no need of CCTV cameras because he understood exactly who was who, our bank manager, equipped with local knowledge, could match lenders and borrowers sensibly and thereby contribute to the gradual prospering of the world which his customers wove together and somehow felt they could control.

Alas, he is long gone and machines now greet those customers as they walk into the Bank’s fluorescent hall.