February is usually the month when nature tells my brain to release those endorphins that cheer me up. A spring comes into the step and my mind begins to look beyond the world of fear piled high on the market stalls of Public Opinion. Instead, I look into the lives of family and friends where I see hope, optimism, generosity of spirit and above all humour. Mention of which reminds me that during a break in a Redmarley choir practice just before Christmas, the talk turned to the topic of flue jabs at Staunton and Corse Village hall. The choir mistress said that she had missed her public jab but that a pharmacist had given her a private jab later. “If”, I asked, “The public jab was in the arm, where was the private jab?” Quick as a flash she replied, “In Sainsbury’s”.
This example of pre-Christmas humour took my mind back to the TV appeals from international charities looking for anything up to £24 a month in donations. Now, I assume that all readers are charitably disposed towards those in need, but one advert from an animal charity caught my ear. It used mood music to draw attention to its mission which was to “Save more innocent animals”. I didn’t think much at first, but then realised the language used was disingenuous. If the advertisers really wanted to save innocent animals, who do they think are going to save the guilty ones?
This year will be the ninth, since a Japanese man invented a global computer based system of money. Unlike other monetary systems that are based on gold and public confidence, this new system is called Bitcoin and exists only in digital form on computers. It is not based on gold but relies on its cyber security system to give people confidence. It does not have a physical substance however; it can be bought and sold. Around 12 million bitcoins are now listed as being owned and their individual value goes up and down. Currently one bitcoin is worth around ten thousand pounds, and I have a friend who owns 0.38 of one of them, worth, a lot more than the £400 he paid for it.
Brokers across the world trade bitcoins, and their computers are linked to ensure that no coin can be bought or sold without every other computer on the network recording that transaction. This means that demand and supply is known and so, only if demand for new coins exceeds the total being offered for sale, can a new coin by created or, as they say, ‘mined’ by a broker. The system code for ensuring no money can be created without every part of the system ‘agreeing’ is called Block-Chain and so far, those computer codes are unbroken.
Every computer knows who owns every coin and all its history, with the result that cyber storage now consumes as much energy as does the whole of Ireland. But, as the majority of computers used to store all this data are located in China, some folk are worried that China will be tempted to tamper with the system in some way.
Experts are divided about this emerging currency: Some say it will prevent politicians printing money and thus stealing our savings through devaluation, but others are concerned that the people who own the computers will know too much about our finances. Some say it is a Ponzi scheme or pyramid selling, and economic historians remind us of the Dutch Tulip bubble of 1637 and the dot-com boom of the Nineteen Nineties.
My own guess is that whatever happens to bitcoin, some of the computer code behind it will survive and be used by governments to gain ever more control over our lives. I say this because politicians are human, and as basic human nature has not changed since the beginning of time, politicians and others with power, will do what they always have.
Finally, thinking about human nature reminds me of a tale told by The Times columnist Nigel Farndale. Whilst musing on why he and his wife are still together he writes, “Maybe it’s our mutual appreciation of alcohol, but perhaps also something more elusive. I enjoy laughing at her and her at me and some of her insults have been inspired, such as when I limped home early one morning tired from jogging at what was, admittedly, a very leisurely pace. I collapsed into a chair and told her how I had just been attacked by a large Crow. Without lifting her head from the cornflakes she replied;
“Must have thought you were carrion”
View from the Pew 