Designing For Digital Currencies

December 23, 2023

I wrote a book. The book is specifically about the design of paper money, and what that means — with respect to art history, product design, and new forms of money, like cryptocurrency. The book draws on my experience as an artist who uses authentic banknote design in their work, someone who has real world experience both the art world and the world of banknote production, and of course, crypto. My function in the world has been a rare bridge between the world of banknote printing and cryptocurrency, via art. This is given me unique insights and has allowed me to reflect on the nature of art and money, in a way few would have an opportunity to do.

Consequently, the book isn’t a dry whitepaper, or an academic thesis. It’s in the ‘art coffee table’ category, with plenty of pictures, as there should be. It’s an artists’ and designers’ book.

Most books are written with a specific audience in mind. This makes them easier to market and tell a neat story. Instead, I approached this book with a specific thread — banknotes — weaving through art, history, product design, cryptocurrency, the future of money and society, leading to philosophy: why and how do we trust money? How do we know what we know? What is money?

This is because of the unique set of influences that built this book. ‘Unique’ is an over-used word. But here I feel it’s deserved. I started as an artist, I was employed by the banknote industry in 2015, then I took the bold step to live and breathe art in the realm of cryptocurrency, in the nascent digital art space of 2019. This trajectory has forced me to ask questions that aren’t normal: Why can’t cryptocurrency have a banknote aesthetic? What is banknote design? Where is banknote design’s place in art history? Banknotes are aesthetically pleasing, but why can’t they be considered art? Where is the line between banknotes, art and collectibles? If collectibles are digital, what does that say about physical money?

Ultimately, the book represents my process as an artist and designer. It outlines the territory I move in this lifetime. All artists and designers have a dialogue that allows for endless idea generation; a perpetual mechanism that spits out ideas. For the successful designer, this is important. It’s also important to be aware of history, and where you belong in history. It’s important to understand the direction of visual trends. The secret sauce for a designer is the hidden role of intuition. This is a crucial element to the design dialogue that can’t be taught, only felt. Intuition means reaching deeply and feeling of the best solution to a design problem. What I’ve written in Art & Money is my dialogue that allows me to do all these things.

With that said, I share a few key insights from Art & Money…

A HISTORY OF PHYSICAL BITCOIN

When I’m talking about the intersection between cryptocurrency and banknotes, I’m talking about crypto in physical form. Let’s look at a quick history that makes physical crypto possible.

These slides are self-explanatory. A physical bitcoin wallet is just a piece of paper with two strings of characters — a public key, that allows Bitcoin to be sent, and a private key that allows the funds in the wallet to spent. This idea has gone through several evolutions, from an online wallet generator, to coins, to technological developments that paved the way for authentically printed ‘Bitcoin banknotes’ — my own efforts, and Noteworthy’s, showcased above.

WHY WOULD ANYONE WANT PHYSICAL BITCOINS ???

I’m not an evangelist for any specific form of money. Yes, I’ve somewhat tethered my career to the banknote, and paper money will always be a source of inspiration. But, as I write in the book, I’m agnostic to all forms of money. So let me make this clear: I’m not an evangelist for crypto, cash, gold, and silver, or CBDCs! They all work some of the time, and none of them work all the time. They all reflect a different part of our aspirations and play their role at distinct junctures in Human evolution.

I’m not an evangelist for crypto or cash, so why am I the pusher of crypto-banknotes? Why would anyone want crypto-enabled cash?? (I.e., cash-like notes capable of holding or transmitting crypto).

The real benefit of crypto-enabled cash is that it allows for off-chain crypto transactions; it blends cash’s unmatched privacy with the unmatched strength of the decentralized ledger. Beyond that, ‘crypto-cash’ has been a thought experiment that has generated my best insights into art, money, product design, and the future of Humanity — enough to write a book. These insights have also propelled my business and have been the basis of my sales pitch for crypto-cash.

The first insight: crypto in technically ‘trustless’, but we are not. Humans work on trust and intuition. One “trusts the science”, where another does not. Why? It’s the same science! It’s proven! It’s numbers! Here is the unquantifiable beauty of the nature of trust.

Humans require at least 17 positive interactions with a brand before they’re able to buy-in. Therefore, crypto is trustless only between computers. But our relationship with crypto requires us to ‘buy-in’. We need branding, a sense of stability, something beautiful that appeals to the unquantifiable and infinite domain of Human emotion.

This is the precise aim of banknote design: to make something look valuable. Banknote design is the visual perfection of trust. No other type of design is more qualified to instill trust in money. This is the upside that banknote design offers to crypto — crypto, which is scary, ethereal, slippery, hackable, volatile, unstable, maligned, banned, illicit, naughty, anti-authoritarian. This upside of banknote design has been the foundation of my crypto-cash-peddling career from 2017.

My second major insight isn’t so revolutionary. It’s instinctive… How come Bitcoin is always represented by stock photos of physical gold and silver coins? Why did the first online wallet generator assume the form of something that looked like a banknote?

The insight is this: we still need money to look and feel physical, even if it isn’t. From the earliest days, Bitcoin has assumed the visual avatar of traditional forms of money, to allow it to move and communicate within the wider ecosystem of money, and to appear as something valuable. Let’s not forget that when Bitcoin was released into the world, it was often disregarded and dismissed, precisely because it wasn’t valuable enough to be worth taking note of. Now a single Bitcoin (today $40,000+) is worth approximately 20 ounces of gold! Do you have any idea how much of the planet must be dug up to find 20 ounces of gold?? Depending on the quality of the deposit, it could be as much as 90 tons to mine just 1 ounce. That’s a heavy Bitcoin. Today, Bitcoin is worthy of the physicality and gravitas of traditional money.

This need for physicality is also a practical consideration. For example, a counterfeit hardware wallet would be a catastrophe, rendering all funds totally compromised. To attempt to counter this, hardware wallet manufacturers rely on the well-trodden advantages of security printing: holographic foils and seals. Crypto is ‘trustless’, but banknote printing technology comes to the rescue!

WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT NFTS

First of all, I have come to resent the term ‘NFT’ as a corporate and technical description. NFTs, as low barrier-to-entry phenomena, have opened the floodgates to the worst, laziest cartoons on the blockchain. Nonetheless, they are what they are: non-fungible tokens, cryptocurrency of one unit.

Despite the NFT, the undeniable truth is that the advent of NFTs in mainstream consciousness have also coincided with the explosion of cryptocurrency into mainstream consciousness. In other words, this proves art’s function; to appeal to Human emotion and offer the opportunity to TRUST, to buy-in, to delight in something that is pure code. The metadata encoded in the NFT is the art that becomes collectible for its rarity and intrigue.

This is the basis of my third insight: crypto was waiting 10 years for the crypto artist. The artist can make base code visually brilliant, appealing, beautiful and valuable. And these positive things are the foundation of creating trust. Suddenly, after the arrival of crypto art, crypto can be trusted and accepted.

In crypto art (art on the blockchain, essentially NFTs), crypto has been given a visual language that is unique and distinct. Crypto has been given its voice. So, if you want to design for crypto, you better be up-to-speed on this changing visual language, if you want to be relevant. Note too, that each crypto has its own visual voice that seems to come from the unique properties of that coin. For example, Bitcoin and Ethereum are starkly different in their function, and this is demonstrated by their opposing visual landscape.

This has led to many more insights. Something I go into detail in the book is the role of meaning and symbolism in art associated with crypto. And as an artist with a rigorous understanding of the direction of art over the last 200 years, I find the role of meaning in ‘Crypto Art’ interesting because it diverges from the role of meaning in the rest of the art world, and visual culture in general.

I don’t want to get too complicated for this article — I go into detail in the book. But my basic assertion is that art and design that is associated with money (such as numismatic design, banknote design, and now crypto art) instinctively seeks out symbolic meaning to communicate authentically. And this authenticity is part of the trust-building imperative of all art that relates to money. And in addition, this is not how our visual culture operates.

We live in ‘postmodernity’. Postmodernism is about a denial of meaning. Now, this could get very complex, but I’m going to simplify it with a brilliant example: in the UK in the 2000s there was advertisement for the chocolate company Cadbury’s, in which a gorilla was sat at a drum set, while Phil Collins’ ‘In The Air’ plays. The Gorilla hits the drums at the right moment in the song, the camera pans out, and the ad finishes with Cadbury’s logo and brand colors. What does a gorilla playing Phil Collins have to do with chocolate? Absolutely nothing. It’s a pattern interrupt. It’s a denial of meaning. It’s a juxtaposition of elements that do not strengthen meaning, they betray meaning. This is Postmodernism. It’s what you see in the art gallery, and it’s also how most of culture has operated for the last few decades. Another classic example is the way in which people are tattooed with languages they can’t speak or read, but they say ‘looks cool’. Living with Postmodernism, we have become quite agnostic to symbols and meaning.

The reason I’m fascinated by the art of banknote design is that it is an artistic outlier. Everything on a banknote is to honor meaning and symbolism. Even ‘postmodernity’ in banknote design still conforms to a very Modernist approach to meaning and symbolism.

I think I’m the only person to point this out, and I’m the only person who would be able to point this out. Banknote design isn’t part of art history, it’s part of product design. But being someone who is always dancing between art and money, crypto art, and cryptocurrency, I’ve been forced to see the banknote in artistic terms, and this has produced insights into recent art history, visual culture, and why money looks like it does.

It’s also an insight that has been proven by crypto art. Before crypto art, I have only one data point: the banknote. But now crypto art has grown to a point of maturity where we can see how it communicates, celebrates, and affirms the glory of its underlying cryptocurrency. In other words, both banknotes and crypto art are united in their approach to meaning and symbolism, and both move counter to the direction of the rest of visual culture.

Isn’t it funny, when it comes to money — the bottom line — we seek authenticity of communication? Everything else is allowed to be sarcastic, but money prompts us to commit to an authentic approach to meaning in banknote design, numismatic art, and crypto art. This is the ultimate meaning of Art & Money.

WORDS OF WARNING

Crypto is seasonal. This is what allowed me to write my book. The bulk was written in the later half of 2022 and the early half of 2023, when crypto was in a lull. Right now, as I write, Bitcoin is up, and the world is toasting sugar-lined glasses of eggnog to premature dreams of 100k. Enthusiastic youngsters excitedly try to convince me to buy into the latest hyped NFT project. Being in Bitcoin for so long, I have learned to be stoic. Being a student of world history, I have lived for 10,000 years, and I know the ride could end at any moment.

Everything in crypto is also so temporary in the grand scheme of things. Every cycle builds and destroys like the tide does to sand. Cryptocurrency is brilliant, but the market is a microcosm of human emotion at its most naïve. I was a very early investor in Bitcoin, but even I recognize that this is still an experiment. A mere solar flare, an unknown flaw, a change in the code, or CBDCs; you choose your probable nightmare scenario for the end of crypto.

But a book is a time capsule that potentially lasts forever. And this book could not have been written without living and breathing crypto. Take note banknote designers: this is also what you’ll have to do if you’re interested in designing for crypto. There is a definite ethos, a respect of specific symbols, and a mindset that is in tune to the aspirations of crypto. My book and my art are proof of my qualification in this unique and evolving area of visual and financial culture.

The book ultimately represents a completed strand of my life, living in a unique space between art and money. What’s next? I couldn’t choose one at the expense of the other, but I will evolve my relationship with both, generating new ideas, making new waves, and who knows… perhaps the next chapter will inspire new books.