On November 22nd, we had a Sustainable FinTech Meetup together with Jürg Conzett from the Money Museum / Sunflower Foundation and Marcus Dapp from ETH Zurich / FuturICT 2.0 around the topic of «Finance 4.0 – a decentralized incentive system for good?». The meetup started with a quick tour of the Money Museum by Jürg Conzett in which we gained some insights into the history and background of the monetary system. Afterwards, Marcus Dapp gave us an introduction to the concept of Finance 4.0.
Money can be understood as one of the strongest ways that societies can express what they value and what they do. However, the main purpose of money nowadays is profit maximisation and the creation of money lies at the privilege of banks. The financial system is one-dimensional, striving for the direction of profit maximisation. Finance 4.0 thus suggests that the current system has limitations, is failing in many ways and that a new financial system is needed wherein
- The concept of money is extended as to understand money as an information signal of what societies value
- New «monies» to represent different incentives are being explored
- Everyone can design new «monies», that can theoretically be used by everyone
The financial system should become multidimensional and not only focus on the one dimension of profit maximization. It should enable society to reach for different goals that reflect the diversity of their values. It should be designed bottom-up, meaning anyone is able to make a proposal of directions / goals to be traced. It should also be a decentralized network of peers, wherein everybody has the same rights and it should be governed in a democratic way.
The system would enable people to address problems they would like to solve and would systematically create clearer incentives for doing so. An easy example of how that system would work is the following: You plant a tree, you prove to the system that you have planted a tree and you obtain a tree token. Of course, the system is much more complex than this and faces many challenges. Check the whole presentation of Marcus Dapp on youtube to find out more about it.
