Call them libraries of the past or even treasure chests of history, museums are known for telling yesterday’s stories. However, the Centretown-based Bank of Canada Museum is about to unveil an exhibit on electronic money — a form of currency so new its story only began a few years ago.
Museum visitors will soon be able to get a glimpse of the futuristic currency’s recent past in a new travelling exhibition called Decoding E-Money, which is being created by curators even as the Sparks Street museum remains closed for a three-year reconstruction ahead of its planned relaunch in mid-2017.
E-money is a digital alternative to physical cash. “It is monetary value that is stored and transferred electronically through a variety of means – a mobile phone, tablet, contactless card (or smart card), computer hard drive or servers,” says the Bank of Canada website.
The exhibit, which will also contain more than 60 artifacts covering the way Canadians have spent their dollars over the past 200 years, will allow people to discover how e-money satisfies society’s monetary needs and fits into the evolution of currency.
“This has been an extremely challenging exhibition to develop,” museum writer Graham Iddon said in a recent blog post about the exhibit. “We are taking, for us, the unprecedented step of interpreting something that is not only current but continually changing.”
He also explained that most of the material will be presented via touch panels because it is more than likely that the content will change significantly over the life of the exhibition. “It’s just a whole lot simpler to change text on a computer than on a printed panel,” he noted.
The subject, which was conceived by research teams working at the Bank of Canada, was inspired by Canada’s increasing interest in electronic currencies such as Bitcoin, which was only invented in 2008.
“E-money is of interest to Canadians, especially teens and young adults who conduct much of their lives online,” says Ken Ross, director of the Bank of Canada Museum. “And the Bank of Canada is staying on top of this trend.”
Ross says the topic also helps the museum achieve its new mission.
“As part of the transformation of the former Currency Museum to the Bank of Canada Museum, we have a new mandate to educate Canadians about the Bank of Canada’s functions and its role in guiding the Canadian economy,” he says. “Though we still interpret economic and monetary history, we also interpret the present.”
The exhibition is in its final stages of fabrication, with the testing of interactive components and final assembly happening this month. The 1,400- to 2,000-square-foot. exhibit will include a “cryptocurrency” zone, a hands-on history timeline to trace the roots of e-money, a bitcoin mining simulation game, a map of payment system routes and a quiz station.
Some experts have raised concerns about the potential for tax evaders and other criminals exploiting the e-money phenomenon.
“I think a lot of people associate bitcoin with negative things like crime,” says Jeremy Clark, an assistant professor at the Concordia Institute for Information Systems Engineering. “So I think that an exhibit is good to showcase what it is actually useful for.”
Clark, who is also the author of the preface to the book Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency Technologies says creating an exhibit on digital currencies like bitcoin “shows that the Bank of Canada understands that this technology is probably here to stay.”
Since the Bank of Canada Museum is currently closed, Decoding E-Money is being conceived as a traveling exhibition that will be available from June 2016 to December 2019.
Ross says Decoding E-Money is the fourth of five travelling exhibitions being developed to allow the museum to remain accessible and relevant to Canadians for the time being.