money

With all the talk of the dollar being replaced by the euro or the yuan, one may have easily missed Weibo - among China’s largest micro-blogging sites – announcing the launch of a virtual currency aptly named weibi.

Through this move the Chinese ‘Twitter’ is trying to generate some revenue from its impressive user base (estimated at 200 million). The curreny is equivalent to one yuan for each unit and users can use their bank accounts or online payment tool Alipay to top up their weibi account.

The introduction of fees Weibo runs the risk of antagonising the micro-blogging community and killing the golden goose. If that happens, it will always have the possibility to devaluate the weibi.

Bruce Sterling, science-fiction and tech journalist - and Lift's "big thinker in residence" - talks about the implications of money digitization. His though-provoking presentation deals with how virtual money systems are the financial services for the new urban poor.

"When you are working on cell phones, when you are working on the web, when you are working on electronic money and payment systems, you need to think: What if my user is a North-Korean"

How would I do this differently if I knew my user was from Pyongyang, that his regime had collapsed, that his economy had collapsed, he was completely bewildered, and he had never seen a cell phone or a computer in his life, and I intended to make him a productive and happy fellow citizen in ten years, what kind of technology would I give that person, what kind of trading system, economic system?”

Hanna Cho's note from the session about the "Virtual Money" at LIFT Asia. The first speaker, David Birch, an economist gave his perspective on the future of digital currency, he was followed by science-fiction writer Bruce Sterling.