Cattle ought to be raised grazing in pasture, not confined to dirty feedlots and gorged on government-subsidized corn. That’s not a controversial statement for anyone familiar with the health, ecological, or taste benefits of grass-fed beef. Here’s an even less controversial statement: Money ought to be able to roam freely on the Internet like everything else in our digital lives—not be trapped in slow, costly and opaque banking institutions. These past five years, I’ve dedicated most of my time to two enterprises: Estancia Grass Fed Beef, an RSF-financed company, and Uphold, a fintech venture that brings all the benefits of the Internet to money. At first glance, the two don’t have a whole lot in common. Estancia has become the leading grass-fed beef brand in the United States, reconnecting modern consumers to an ancient and sustainable model of food production. Uphold has powered more than $800 million of transactions in 150-plus countries over the past two years. What Estancia and Uphold do share is a mission to transform the unsustainable status quo to the benefit of everyone. Creating an Internet of money is complicated. It requires bringing all the flexibility and innovation of information technology to an aspect of human culture that first emerged over 5,000 years ago—money.

The Evolution of Money

Commerce is the world’s oldest and largest social network. The first gold coins facilitated trade between empires, expanding that network to the benefit of every new connection. Modern banks enabled, even more, exchange over greater distances. But banks quickly settled on a business model predicated on money flow friction (that is, fees and delays), undisclosed risk, and exclusion. The exclusionary nature of banks extends far beyond minimum balance requirements that the working poor and immigrants can’t afford. While billions of people enjoy Internet content and services, many of them have no access to banks and therefore must rely on inadequate venues to pay bills and send money. For humanity’s largest social network to continue growing, money must make the leap to becoming Internet compatible. Currency that’s Internet protocol compatible allows anyone with an email and a cellphone to maintain a money account that is just a click away from every other money account around the globe. This compatibility permits merchants to accept payments from anyone, anywhere, at any time, and in any currency—all instantly and for free. It is the beginning of the end of paper money and most likely of banks as well.

Napster of Money

Bitcoin pointed the way to IP-compatible money. The cryptocurrency demonstrated two key tech innovations. The first was that technology allowed the transfer of value, such as Bitcoin’s digital asset, over the Internet between any two people with no need for intermediary financial institutions (such as banks). The second innovation was that technology could now account for digital assets with real-time transparency. A blockchain is a publicly accessible database that provides a real-time and historical accounting of data. When that data has value, as in the case of the Bitcoin blockchain or Uphold’s Reservechain, this data structure also provides traceability of all transactions back to their source. This public, real-time, and searchable presentation of data holds the promise of creating a new standard of transparency and accountability for financial services. Just about every too-big-to-fail bank has recently announced an initiative involving blockchain technology. This typically takes the form of a working group or pilot program. But it is unlikely that any existing financial service will play the role of an iTunes to Bitcoin’s Napster. Zero-cost, instant, and real-time transparency are all anathema to the banking business model of fractional reserve. Undisclosed risk is how banks can afford to pay those fat bonuses, and also why prominent and pedigreed banks go bust all the time. Bitcoin’s fatal flaw is that it isn’t anybody’s money—it’s too volatile and exotic. It is a revolutionary technology that almost no one can use. But just as Napster gave way to iTunes, Spotify, Pandora, and a host of other ventures dedicated to disseminating IP-compatible music, Bitcoin’s innovations will arrive for the masses via tech ventures committed to making it easy for consumers and businesses to access and use IP-compatible money.

The Internet of Money

What might such a venture look like? It would have to enable any form of value, just as IP can accommodate any sort of information. Moving money with this service would have to be as instant and free as posting a photo to Facebook or messaging on WhatsApp. It would have to be accessible to anyone with a networked device, and easy for anyone to join regardless of what amount of money he or she wants to hold in the online cloud. And it would have to incorporate Bitcoin’s real-time transparency, disclosing and accounting publicly for all risk in the system. Such an IP money platform would also need to provide a way for developers and entrepreneurs to easily build businesses on top of it, so that the people who best understand local money problems can address them. We are very close to making this scenario a reality. With Uphold, today anyone in the world can hold over 30 forms of value, from fiat currencies to cryptocurrencies to precious metals—all in digital form. Moving and converting money on Uphold is instant and free. Developers are building over 200 businesses on top of Uphold’s open application programming interface. And we do it all with a real-time accounting of our system’s assets and liabilities—a proof of solvency—so that Uphold members know their value is safe. By expanding the social network of global commerce to anyone with Internet access, IP-compatible money will foster economic opportunity and freedom at an unprecedented scale. Circumventing the ever-growing skim that banks claim off the top of financial transactions, the new approach to money will enrich local communities and strengthen their connections. It will empower individuals and profit entrepreneurs. And money—that mutable meme and foundation upon which we have built modern civilization—will flash like lightning from one person to another.

By John Bloom

Farmers have much to teach us about money and the economic climate. Good farmers now know that they can no longer count on historical weather patterns; instead, they speak of climate chaos and are challenged to farm with a new consciousness. Their planning has had to let go of past expectations, and instead they attend to deeply observing, anticipating, directly participating in, and reacting to the climate as an immediate phenomenon—changeable, unpredictable, filled with events of an unprecedented scale. For farmers, global warming is only one facet of the new chaord, a delicate and shifting condition that holds both chaos and order as co-present and a term coined by Dee Hock.

In a New York Times op-ed piece from November 28, 2010, titled “An Almanac of Extreme Weather,” Jack Hedlin, a Minnesota farmer, explained the plight of farming in the era of climate change:  “Climate change, I believe, may eventually pose an existential threat to my way of life. A family farm like ours may simply not be able to adjust quickly enough to such unendingly volatile weather. We cannot charge enough for crops in our good years to cover the losses in the ever-more-frequent bad ones.”  The production or market farmers I know, even the biodynamic ones, have been worried about this issue for more than a few years now. What Hedlin has touched on is not only symptomatic of agriculture but also has broad-reaching implications for all of how economic life sustains us, or not. So, uncertainty, whether you think of it as a concept or feel it as a condition of psyche, is central to and, to a degree, defines our lives and our times.  It plays at the boundary between our desire to know and control, and the capability of functioning effectively in the ambiguity that characterizes the chaord.

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There are many uncertainty parallels between agriculture and our financial system. The extreme financial “market” events of the last few years have devastated the economy, just as the volatile weather events have wiped out whole farm crops at short notice. The restoration process, whether rebuilding a retirement fund or the fertility of the topsoil, is long. What distinguishes the financial markets from agriculture is that while farmers are privileged to steward natural systems, financiers operate in a world that is entirely human-made. It is our own invention and thus has within it both the genius and flaws of human character. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. That human nature could be considered disconnected from the rest of the natural world, or that humans are the master of nature are both fictive concepts. From an economic standpoint, from the perspective of how we work in the world to meet each other’s material needs, such fiction is used to justify how one person can benefit from another’s sacrifice and how we can continue to consume and waste nature for the sake of undue profit. To accept the fictive concepts, and narrative that follows from them, means that the moral foundation, one might even say purpose, of our economic interdependence is debased. This is one way to make sense of, but not explain away, the abysmal Wall Street actions in which bets were made against the best interests of people, whether in securities (an ironic name), derivatives or hedges, in the name of profitability. A culture without a moral compass is also a chaord because it is so vulnerable to the whims or intentions, good and bad, of individual action with no force of accountability or law. This is not to condemn all financial markets, just as I would not condemn all agricultural practices. It is a question of whether those practices contribute to healing or further destroying nature and the integrity of human nature. Farmers and investors who have chosen or are choosing a healing path are developing new approaches and new capacities to operate with integrity in functional uncertainty. Some investors now know that modern portfolio theory no longer works; its assumptions, based on certainty of patterns, are in serious question. This theory, it turns out, assumed that the world operates with machine-like predictability, and that the theory itself would suffice as a predictor of market behavior and return. Does the risk-reward paradigm still make sense in light of how closely it has come to resemble gambling?  Risk, it seems, is an index of possible failure. Actuarial methodology is devoted to understanding, measuring, and managing risk. It is all based on a gesture of protection and distrust, and consciously excludes uncertainty from its formulas. But it is uncertainty that most directly affects us. What does investing look like if uncertainty is recognized as a central tenet? How does one develop trust that an entrepreneur or enterprise will be successful and over what time frame? One might say that a new approach to investing is like a farmer planting a crop. You prepare and plow the field as best as you can, pay full attention to all the natural forces at work, pay loving attention to the plants as they grow while in deep observation of the environment, weather, climate, prepared to make adjustments—sometimes it means frost protection at 4:00 in the morning. These are all part of an active engagement that places a premium on minute-by-minute human attention and a capacity for anticipation, always with a view of long-term outcomes. This kind of engagement leaves no room for a mechanistic view, no room for passive assumptions, and treats uncertainty as real and present, and as a prime motivator for bringing a healing impulse into the world. Uncertainty has a role to play in our transforming consciousness. Uncertainty pushes the boundaries of knowing in a new way that may not fit within conventional science, since it assumes we are part of rather than master of world. This view means that we (human nature) suffer as the environment suffers, that everyone’s future is equally uncertain despite the inequity of resources. We are fully interdependent; and our inner climate inseparable from the outer. So, the balancing force to uncertainty resides in how we work with others in and through our social structures: of relationship, community, and work; how we develop trust, create our agreements, and engage out of natural interest in each other. This is also an imagination of risk sharing as a new strategy for risk mitigation and management. For anyone seeking a spiritual path, uncertainty is a call to practice. With this call in mind, due diligence takes on a new level of discipline, one which adds imagination and intuition to the analysis. The marketplace as it currently exists places great emphasis on results and commodities, with little interest in the consequences for human sustainability and soil fertility. The investor and the farmer will find this set of priorities transformed when they recognize that they do not really decide or operate solely for themselves out of self-interest, but rather are long-term contributors to the broader value-creating community, whether local, regional, or global. When uncertain events occur, community is the first responder because the value of the activity, farm or enterprise, is held as essential to the sustainability of the community itself.  Thus, understanding community, imagining it, testing it, setting prices with it are part of a new discipline that will inevitably change the financial system. Uncertainty can be a powerful teacher as we invite it in from the shadowy margins of our financial systems. As we learn to live with and celebrate its ambiguity, we will likely be more awake to discerning those opportunities that recognize economic interdependence, and those investments that bear the seeds of a more social and livable economy. Such a change will also require a reframing of outcomes and purposes. The outcome of farming: soil fertility with commodity production a by-product. The outcome of investment: economic renewal and equilibrium with return as a by-product. Living into uncertainty can certainly bring about the needed shift in our priorities for a new economy. John Bloom is the Director of Organizational Culture at RSF Social Finance. If you enjoyed this post, look for John’s book, The Genius of Money, on steinerbooks.org.