Cash and the Politicisation of Payments

What do the KGB, the Chinese Communist Party, the Canadian Prime Minister and the UK’s Brexit campaign leader have in common?

In reality not a lot, but all point to a common theme, which is about the increasingly unhealthy symbiosis between payments and political control. And it’s not good for freedom. Nor for cash.

Let’s look at the KGB first. In 1971, it investigated a new kind of surveillance system that would enable it to keep track of everyone inside the Soviet Union without them knowing about it. It tasked a group of computer scientists and surveillance experts to come up with something innovative, and that something was to eliminate physical cash and replace it with a digital currency system.