[Book Sip] The Cashless Era... The Weaponization of Currency by 'Fintech Companies'

Some sentences encapsulate the entire content of a book in themselves, while others instantly resonate with the reader’s heart, creating a point of connection with the book. Here, we excerpt and introduce such meaningful sentences from books. - Editor’s note

Following Sweden and China, South Korea leads the way as a ‘cashless society’ with a 90% non-cash payment rate. Moreover, nine out of ten MZ generation individuals use OO Pay services such as Naver Pay and Kakao Pay. In this era where most payments are made with digital money, what have we sacrificed in exchange for convenience? Which stakeholders are waging battles at the center of this? Fintech companies, a fusion of big finance and big tech, are infiltrating the market with ‘cloud money (digital money)’ to replace cash. This book candidly reveals companies’ marketing strategies to spread digital money, the weaponization of COVID-19 to eliminate physical cash in daily life, and even the future outlook of currency.

The relationship between humans and money is far deeper and more profound than humans’ attachment to technology. People fall into a panic when they feel their bank balance is nearly depleted and they are about to lose market accessibility. For me, losing market accessibility is far more terrifying than being a heavy smoker on a long-haul flight. Losing market accessibility would feel like being a fish gasping for water on dry land, slowly suffocating to death. Money enables access to everything we depend on for survival. Therefore, money is the ultimate object of dependence.

What is important here is that we cannot directly hold our money ourselves. This is a story of a completely different dimension. Digital currency recorded in bank accounts exists in remote data centers controlled by banks. We communicate with the bank’s data centers through smartphones, computers, payment cards, and so on. A ‘cashless society’ can be described as a world where our financial transaction capabilities are entrusted to and managed by financial institutions.

---p.23 The Contradiction Between Money and Technology

Blockchain technology originally promised to offer a decentralized alternative to resolve the increasingly severe oligopoly phenomena in financial and technology markets, which was briefly mentioned in the first part. Initially, blockchain technology began to be developed to address concerns that a cashless society could severely infringe on civilians’ privacy and to mitigate the risk of excessive concentration of power in one place?whether state or corporate?in the digital age. However, blockchain technology itself has many ambiguous contradictions. One of these is that financial institutions and large corporations are not recoiling from blockchain technology but are rather desperate to absorb it into their own systems. This is because financial institutions and large corporations can use blockchain technology, which harmoniously connects distributed individual networks, as a means to regulate oligopolistic phenomena within their own organizations.

---p.38 The Emergence of Cryptocurrency

Cloud Money | Brett Scott (Author) · Jang Jinyoung (Translator) | 452 pages | Sam & Parkers | 17,100 KRW