The thing I want to sort of circle back on here as well is the idea of innovation, right?

Because the way that is discussed in the paper is they see this, number one, we've talked, I think, about what it means really, why they actually want to do it, why they ostensibly want to do it, and what it would mean for you, which is almost, crucially, almost nothing.

But innovation-wise...

Do we imagine that the Bank of England has some sort of sinister motives here?

No, couldn't possibly.

Everything is fine.

So innovation-wise, right, they see it as a kind of platform, a place where you can,

if you are HSBC or whatever, Starling Bank, you can go through and you can innovate on

this ability to, for example, program money. Oh, yes. Yeah, programmable money is a very scary

thought. And before we describe what that is, I'm going to remind everyone that Britain has a habit,

especially in the last 30 years, of creating these systems of fine-grained social control

in order to achieve some kind of goal that they see as benign.

And those fine-grained systems of social control at some point pass into the hands of even bigger

reactionaries who then do all the things that we've seen being done at the home office.

Again, not that the home office really was ever benign, but you get my meaning.

Let's talk about programmable money.

Oh, programmable money is not something you will see in the Bank of England document, and you

don't see it in ECB documents anymore because they have learned to shut up about it.

But if you go to industry conferences on this thing, you tend to meet people who get into

digital currencies are really, really keen on the idea of programmable money

and have no idea what they sound like to a normal human being. So you get people saying,

well, wouldn't it be great, for example, if you could, if you had a kid at university,

...