Cloudmoney
Cash, Cards, Crypto, and the War for Our Wallets
Book Edition Details
Summary
"Cloudmoney (2022) provides an overview of our present payment landscape, revealing how the push towards a cashless society is driven by powerful interests in Big Finance and Big Tech aiming to profit from and gather data on transactions. It explores the disadvantages of eliminating cash, including threats to privacy and freedom, and examines the covert war on physical money."
Introduction
Picture yourself standing in a London Underground station in 2022, watching commuters tap their phones and cards at turnstiles while cash payment signs gather dust. This seemingly mundane scene represents one of the most profound transformations of our economic system since the invention of money itself. What appears as simple technological progress masks a deeper struggle for control over the very foundation of commerce and human interaction. This book reveals how our transition from physical cash to digital payments represents far more than mere convenience. It exposes a carefully orchestrated campaign by financial institutions, technology giants, and complicit governments to reshape the monetary system in their favor. Through this lens, we can understand how Big Finance and Big Tech are merging into an unprecedented surveillance and control apparatus that reaches into every transaction we make. The story unfolds across decades of corporate maneuvering, technological innovation, and political manipulation. From banking executives plotting to make cash "peculiar" to Silicon Valley entrepreneurs positioning blockchain as revolution while serving existing power structures, the narrative reveals how ordinary citizens have been systematically nudged toward digital dependency. This transformation affects everyone who uses money, from urban professionals tapping payment apps to rural farmers still preferring the tangible reality of banknotes. The implications extend far beyond payment methods, touching privacy, freedom, economic sovereignty, and the very nature of human autonomy in an increasingly algorithmic world.
The War on Cash: Banking's Assault on Physical Money
The assault on physical money began quietly in corporate boardrooms and regulatory offices, disguised as consumer convenience and modernization. Since the early 2000s, a coordinated campaign has emerged to systematically undermine cash usage while promoting digital alternatives. This war is not fought with weapons but with marketing campaigns, policy initiatives, and infrastructure changes that make cash increasingly difficult to use. Financial institutions recognized that cash represented their greatest competitor. Unlike digital transactions, cash payments generate no fees, provide no data, and operate outside banking control. Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan captured this sentiment perfectly when he declared "we want a cashless society," noting his firm had "more to gain than anybody" from eliminating cash. The banking sector's motivation became clear through their actions: closing ATMs, charging fees for cash services, and lobbying governments to restrict large cash transactions through "cash thresholds" that gradually reduced the amounts people could spend in physical currency. The payments companies proved even more aggressive in their anti-cash crusade. Visa launched campaigns like "Cashfree and Proud" with the explicit goal of making cash "peculiar" by 2020, while offering financial incentives to merchants who refused cash payments. These companies understood that every cash transaction represented lost revenue and reduced data collection opportunities. Their solution was not merely to compete with cash but to eliminate it entirely through systematic demonization and infrastructure removal. The COVID-19 pandemic provided the perfect catalyst for accelerating these long-planned campaigns. Despite scientific evidence showing that cash posed no greater health risk than card payment terminals, corporations and governments seized upon hygiene concerns to justify cashless policies. This manufactured crisis allowed the anti-cash coalition to achieve in months what might have taken years under normal circumstances, fundamentally shifting public perception and behavior around physical money.
Digital Transformation: Big Tech Meets Big Finance (2000s-2010s)
The emergence of fintech during the 2000s marked a crucial turning point in the relationship between technology and finance. Initially presented as a David versus Goliath story, with scrappy startups challenging stodgy banks, the reality proved far more complex. Rather than disrupting traditional finance, these new players became the bridge that allowed Silicon Valley aesthetics and Big Finance infrastructure to merge into something unprecedented. The fintech revolution began with a fundamental misunderstanding about the nature of banking. Entrepreneurs believed they were creating alternatives to traditional financial institutions, but they were actually building new interfaces for the same underlying system. Companies like PayPal, Revolut, and countless others positioned themselves as bank killers while remaining entirely dependent on the banking system for their core functionality. They offered sleek apps and user-friendly experiences while routing all transactions through the same oligopolistic financial infrastructure they claimed to disrupt. This symbiotic relationship benefited both sectors enormously. Banks gained access to younger, tech-savvy customers without the costs of developing their own digital capabilities from scratch. Meanwhile, tech companies acquired the regulatory legitimacy and financial infrastructure they needed to handle money at scale. The supposed disruption became collaboration, with venture capitalists funding experiments that banks could later acquire or replicate. The transformation accelerated as major tech platforms recognized the strategic importance of payment integration. Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon all launched payment services, not as standalone businesses but as essential components of their broader platform strategies. These companies understood that controlling payment flows meant controlling access to commerce itself. By 2015, the lines between tech and finance had blurred beyond recognition, setting the stage for an even more fundamental transformation of money itself.
Cryptocurrency Revolution and Corporate Co-optation (2008-2020s)
The 2008 financial crisis birthed Bitcoin amid dreams of monetary revolution and banking system replacement. Emerging from cypherpunk mailing lists and libertarian philosophy, cryptocurrency promised to deliver what fintech had only pretended to offer: a genuine alternative to centralized financial control. The Bitcoin whitepaper outlined an elegant solution to the problem of digital money without central authorities, sparking a movement that would reshape global finance in unexpected ways. The early cryptocurrency community embodied genuine revolutionary spirit, attracting everyone from anarchist hackers to monetary conservatives united by distrust of existing institutions. Bitcoin's fixed supply and decentralized architecture challenged fundamental assumptions about money creation and control. For the first time since the gold standard, individuals could hold money that existed outside government and banking system control, immune to monetary manipulation and surveillance. However, the crypto revolution contained inherent contradictions that ultimately enabled its co-optation. While promoting decentralization, Bitcoin's energy-intensive mining process led to massive centralization of mining power in industrial operations. More fundamentally, the tokens remained tethered to the existing monetary system through exchange rates, making them more like commodities than money alternatives. Speculation replaced utility as the primary driver of adoption, transforming revolutionary tools into investment vehicles for the existing financial system. The corporate capture of cryptocurrency became explicit by 2020, when major financial institutions began offering crypto trading services and technology companies started implementing blockchain solutions for oligopoly coordination. Wall Street embraced what was supposed to destroy it, while blockchain technology found its primary application in automating existing power structures rather than replacing them. The revolution had been successfully absorbed, its transformative potential redirected toward strengthening the very systems it initially challenged.
Toward Digital Domination: The Cashless Future Unfolds
The convergence of anti-cash campaigns, fintech development, and cryptocurrency absorption has created the foundation for unprecedented corporate control over monetary systems. Today's digital payment landscape represents the successful merger of Big Tech and Big Finance into a surveillance and control apparatus that would have been unimaginable just decades ago. Every digital transaction feeds data streams that power algorithmic decision-making about credit, insurance, employment, and social standing. The COVID-19 pandemic marked the acceleration phase of this digital transformation. Lockdowns drove e-commerce adoption while health concerns provided justification for cashless policies. Amazon's revenue increased by over 40 percent in 2020, earning nearly $14,000 per second through digital payment systems that integrated seamlessly with its logistics empire. Traditional retailers faced pressure to go cashless, while digital payment companies recorded record profits and user growth. Physical cash usage plummeted by over 50 percent in many developed countries, representing perhaps the fastest monetary transformation in human history. Central banks now face an impossible choice between allowing complete private sector domination of digital payments or launching their own Central Bank Digital Currencies that could trigger bank runs and destabilize existing financial institutions. Meanwhile, corporate stablecoins threaten to bypass national monetary sovereignty entirely, as companies like Facebook develop payment systems that could operate across borders with minimal government oversight. The traditional distinction between private and public money is dissolving in favor of corporate monetary systems that serve private rather than public interests. The implications extend far beyond payment convenience into questions of human autonomy and social control. Artificial intelligence systems now scan transaction data to make automated decisions about individuals' access to credit, insurance, and services. Payment censorship capabilities allow instant economic exclusion of dissidents or undesirable groups. The panopticon effect creates self-censorship as people modify their behavior knowing that every purchase generates permanent records accessible to unknown algorithmic systems. The cashless society represents not technological progress but the digitization of social control.
Summary
The rise of digital finance represents a fundamental shift in power from individuals and communities toward corporate algorithms and surveillance systems. What began as campaigns for payment convenience has evolved into comprehensive social control infrastructure that monitors, predicts, and shapes human behavior through monetary flows. The merger of Big Tech and Big Finance has created unprecedented concentration of power over the most basic human activities of buying, selling, and exchanging value. This transformation was not inevitable but resulted from deliberate choices by powerful institutions to prioritize corporate profit and control over individual autonomy and privacy. The COVID-19 pandemic provided the perfect crisis to accelerate changes that might have faced greater resistance under normal circumstances. Yet the speed of this transformation also reveals its fragility. The digital payment empire depends entirely on complex technological infrastructure, corporate cooperation, and public compliance that could be disrupted by coordinated resistance or alternative system development. The path forward requires conscious choice rather than passive acceptance of technological inevitability. Protecting cash as a parallel payment system preserves space for economic activity outside corporate surveillance. Supporting genuinely decentralized alternatives like mutual credit systems and community currencies can create resilient local economies. Most importantly, recognizing digital payment as a political choice rather than natural evolution empowers individuals and communities to demand systems that serve human flourishing rather than corporate domination. The future remains contested territory where active engagement can still influence outcomes.
By Brett Scott
