In recounting her experience of being asked the ‘Bitcoin Question’, Lana Swartz reveals that her response to friends and family enquiring about the risks of getting in on the cryptocurrency game is to ask what they want to achieve through their acquisition. Simply put: what are all the Bitcoins for? The typical answers to Swartz's provocation are both achingly dull and easily anticipated. People have heard of others making decent returns by speculating on Bitcoin rallies and want to get in on the action. In other words, the primary motivation of those who want to acquire Bitcoins is to use them to acquire more Bitcoins, which at some point in the future will have risen to a price deemed high enough to ‘cash out’ via a fiat currency of choice. At the exit point of sale, after all, nobody imagines selling their Bitcoins for more Bitcoins.

The more imaginative would-be speculators answer in ways that reveal a growing sense of existential threat. As political, social and economic institutions lurch from one catastrophe to the next, at least they are providing a distraction from the impending world-ending breakdown of the climate. In short, if Bitcoin is to be the only non-institutionalized global currency within a matter of decades, doesn't it make sense to start hoarding them now?

In both responses, we can see the same instincts that drive people to save money. A desire to have more of it stored up against an uncertain future makes a good deal of sense from one point of view. But what is missing in the answers to Swartz's Bitcoin Question, and what we have been arguing for throughout this book, is any meaningful sense of the purpose of Bitcoin. As with mainstream finance, so much of the debate focuses upon the technical and functional possibilities of Bitcoin that we have failed sufficiently to pause and to reflect on what the advocates and users of Bitcoin are trying to achieve.

As we saw in Chapter Five, there is a reading of Bitcoin that would promote it – and the entire cryptocurrency and cryptoasset markets made possible by variations of DLTs – as the way out of the current interregnum and towards a more democratic future.

In February 2021, Marie Ekeland, one of the most influential figures in the French FinTech sector, set out the ambition for her new funding vehicle 2050 – designed to have a long-term positive impact on issues like equality and sustainability – in the following way:

In the absence of an overarching and positive vision of how to build a better world collectively through formal democratic processes, and with the future appearing to promise little more than an endless series of world-ending threats to be managed in order to mitigate their most harmful effects, Ekeland struck a more optimistic note in the same article with a very simple but profound observation: ‘Money is actually very powerful but it has to have a destination … If finance is only reproducing the past, then we’re not going to find any solutions to the current new challenges that we have because people do not know how to solve them.’

The story that finance likes to tell about itself, at least since the entrepreneurial turn of the 1980s, is that it is at the cutting edge of innovation. It is certainly true that the plethora of new financial products that have emerged onto the market, especially since the internet revolution of the 2000s, have become increasingly complex and fantastical in their ability to evade popular understanding and thus any real democratic accountability. But what is striking about Ekeland's observation from the very epicentre of the financial innovation sector is how little all of this Promethean creativity has contributed to the betterment of society. Indeed, by ‘only reproducing the past’, finance for all its innovation has too often simply maintained the injustices of the status quo. Far from the radical liberator that appears in fairy tales told by and about the sector, mainstream financial innovation has largely exaggerated and entrenched existing inequalities and had a devastating impact on the natural environment.

In exploring new ways of seeing money and finance, this book has aimed to empower and embolden the reader to start to look at money differently and to question the purpose of our finance system, both what it is now and what it should be. After all, alternative finance was created by a wide social movement across business, academia and civil society, involving many collaborations between people outside of finance with those who were and are utterly disaffected within it.

As well as encouraging more social movements to see the importance of money and finance for furthering their own causes, we hope also that many more practitioners within the finance industry will begin to challenge themselves to develop financial innovations that are founded upon a belief that money can be a force for public good and that finance ought to be more than a complex machine for creating and extracting private profit. The world out there is not an external resource to be mined in the interests of creating financial value. That world out there is nothing less than the lives of billions of people and countless other species in the natural world. The future of finance needs to take far greater care of both if it is to keep hold of its social licence and play a role in delivering the transformation we need to protect people and planet from the urgent threats that both currently face.

In this final chapter, we extend our analysis to set out what we think are some of the most pressing and difficult questions that need to be addressed if we are to free our understanding of finance from its gilded cage and continue our journey towards a world were money is something social, collaborative, accountable, democratic and sustainable. Right now, however, there are those who would interpret the mission of democratizing finance in a very different way to us, seeking to remove the state completely and further eradicate human decision-making from the apparently smooth functioning of tech-enhanced market mechanisms. The rise of distributed ledger technologies (DLTs) such as blockchain, and the cryptocurrencies and cryptoassets these technologies have created, has been interpreted by many as a democratic revolution – putting power into the code-writing hands of people who are free to manage transactions without the need for such cumbersome legacy hardware as banks, law firms and governments.

The rise of crowdfunding and P2P finance in the 21st century has been driven in part by its public promise to facilitate the democratization of finance. At the same time, and in a radically different direction, we have seen a massive concentration of the power over wealth in the mainstream finance industry. As described in Chapter One, we see this concentration as resembling Hobbes's figure of Leviathan in the scale of its influence and reach over our lives.

The growth of this new financial Leviathan, and the redrawing of the social contract by which we negotiate our individual and collective well-being, has occurred at the same time as a widespread collapse in trust – in the state, in democracy and in finance itself. This collapse has placed responsibilities for managing the various trials of daily life increasingly onto already burdened individual shoulders, both in terms of the here and now and in making sufficient provision for later life. In turn, as trust has been lost in the capability of our institutions to protect and provide for us, individuals have chosen to place their trust – that is, their money – into the financial Leviathan, without whose benevolent protection they would be forced to face the future war of all against all from the position of a life that is ‘nasty, precarious, and skint’ (to misquote Hobbes).

In these times of rapid change and uncertainty, we have thus become beholden to a decreasing number of companies who we are empowering to make decisions that affect much of the world's wealth and how it is used. In handing over our trust in the form of our money, professional financiers can command significant fees based on the power they wield. Those fees not only reflect the market power that the finance industry commands, but also its political power. Timely, then, that we should consider whether such a situation is healthy for our democracies and the long-standing principles and values that underpin them.

The question of who controls money, and so the best system for ensuring that its benefits outweigh its costs and risks, is one which has been asked by philosophers, historians and the writers of theatrical comedies since ancient times. Telling the story of that history is the main purpose of this chapter.

Although international commercial arbitration is not subject to as much criticism as investor-State arbitration, it is nonetheless facing challenges going forward. These challenges are several, and only some can be addressed in this chapter. Some relate to concerns that have been with international arbitration for a long time. These include costs, delay and excessive formality, as well as arbitrator neutrality. Others – arbitration ethics, diversity, and transparency – are not new, but are taking on greater urgency. Still others simply represent new developments more or less extrinsic to international arbitration but with which international arbitration must cope. Among these changes to the broader international arbitration landscape are the data protection movement and the rise of both settlement agreements and international commercial courts.

Communities across the globediffer in history, culture, and beliefs; and these differences may help drive how communities process, learn from, and recover after a disaster. When faced with natural disasters, communities respond in diverse ways, with processes that reflect their cultures, needs, the type and extent of damage incurred and resources available to the community. Chapter 5 of Community Disaster Recovery: Moving from Vulnerability to Resilience articulates the ways in which internal community characteristics influence the disaster recovery processes and decisions made by local governments. Prior disaster experience and damage from the most recent disaster, along with perceptions of problem severity and future risk perceptions can influence the degree to which residents view disasters as an increasing and urgent problem for their local governments to manage. Finally, local government information dissemination during disaster recovery can serve two important roles: (1) garnering support for local government action and trust in government decisions, along with (2) incorporating a range of views beyond only technocratic experts to build innovative policy solutions.