Money unlocks the specialism of labour in the pin factory and “the great increase in the quantity of work that 2  results.” And only money can solve the coincidence of wants between the butcher, the brewer, the baker and the student on a Friday evening. 3  1  ‘Stabilising an unstable economy’ Hyman Minsky, 1986 This is the quote as abbreviated on the £ The full quote is “this great increase in the quantity of work which, in consequence of the division of labour, the same number of people are capable of performing”, Book 1, Chapter 1, Smith, A., (1776) ‘An inquiry into the nature and causes of the wealth of nations’. 3 “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest”. Book 1, Chapter 2, ibid. 2  2  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/speeches  2  Many of you probably don’t see Adam Smith notes too often. Not just because you’re impoverished students. Or because you live in Scotland where you’re more likely to encounter Sir Walter Scott or Nan 4  Shepherd on a banknote when you do have cash. But because you use electronic forms of money such as debit cards and mobile phones for your everyday purchases and go online for your larger ones. A number of you may hold other forms of electronic money – crypto or virtual currencies such as Bitcoin, Ether or Scotcoin.
31  PSR indirect access market review, https://www.psr.org.uk/sites/default/files/media/PDF/MR1512-indirect-access-market-reviewinterim-report.pdf 14  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/speeches  14  Finally, at the wholesale payments end, we’ve already explored whether the core of the new RTGS system could run on distributed ledger to discover that the technology is not yet sufficiently mature or reliable to run a system that settles the equivalent of a third of the UK’s annual GDP each day and requires 5-sigma performance. Nonetheless, the Bank believes that distributed ledger technology could over time significantly improve the accuracy, efficiency and security of processes across payments, clearing and settlement. Securities settlement in particular is ripe for innovation. Transactions that take nanoseconds to execute, currently take days to settle along a chain involving many intermediaries. At stake, are the tens of billions of pounds of capital that are tied up while settlement completes. 32  The best in the private sector are working  hard unlocking this value. That’s why the Bank is building the new RTGS so that new forms of securities settlement that meet our standards of resilience (including those using distributed ledger) will be able to plug in directly. Ultimately this combination of new technology and direct access to RTGS could be applied to other assets such as helping make the payment, registration and Stamp Duty processes involved in house purchases quicker and more efficient.