 They've made a mint from mining our memories. Now it seems Facebook wants us to entrust it with our money, too. The social media giant is expected to unveil plans later this morning for a new digital currency enlisting more than a dozen major companies for a billion-pound cryptocurrency consortium. David Clark is head of policy at Positive Money, which was set up in the wake of the financial crash to campaign for fairer money and banking systems. He's also the author of the 2018 report, The Future of Cash. He joins us now. Good morning to you. So, David, what is the future of cash then? Is it cryptocurrency? Well, one of the big drivers of cryptocurrency, which this Facebook announcement is just the latest version, is people looking for an alternative way to manage their money and make payments that doesn't rely on the big banks, which have really lost people's trust. Around the world in the last 10 years. And as cash declines, which is really a process that's being driven by the big banks, the risk is that we're all even more reliant on just a handful of institutions to manage our money, which is why people are looking for alternatives. Yeah, but cryptocurrencies, I haven't had the best of reputation so far, have they? So, you know, is this from what you see, is this more of an effort to bring them into the mainstream of the financial system? Cryptocurrencies have really faced two big problems in achieving the sufficient scale up till now. One has been that they've suffered from massive fluctuations in their value, which we've seen with Bitcoin. Another is that they struggled to build a sufficiently large network of participants. And there's two reasons to think that Facebook's version of cryptocurrency might be able to address these questions. First of all, they're going to peg it to existing fiat currencies, possibly like the dollar, so that will keep the price, potentially keep the price stable. And then obviously, they have a massive head start on the second because they already have a worldwide network of two billion users. But is there an issue here, you know, just in terms of privacy and protection for us all, if we're using something like this? I mean, Facebook itself, you know, seems to be able to almost tell what we're thinking sometimes when you look at your feeds. So, you know, are there worries about how much will be known about us and just how private our access to money can be? Exactly. It's like Facebook's relentless marks continues. They, you know, the means by which we store our most treasured memories, how we communicate with loved ones, and now Facebook's after our money too. I think there definitely are concerns about privacy. Facebook obviously doesn't have a very good track record with the way that it looks after people's data. Also, Facebook is really, it may be not possible to be reined in by regulators around the world. So for example, we already saw that Mark Zuckerberg was asked to appear before the House of Commons and they didn't even show up. And that's an even greater concern perhaps for poorer countries where, you know, if a large part of the population start using Facebook coin, then it will be a huge issue for those countries that people are using a currency they can't control. And also, you know, like we saw with the financial crash more than a decade ago now, if, you know, when the banks were in trouble and on the verge of collapse, you know, we had the central bank, the Bank of England, who had to sort of, you know, step in, there's also there's always some compensation for consumers there. So when you have a if you have a sort of mainstream cryptocurrency system, I mean, does there have to be a way that we can essentially, you know, get our money back if we lose it? Is there going to be a guarantee or an insurance scheme in some way? So this is the idea of having the currency pegged to fiat currencies. So like the dollar or sterling and we'll find out later today whether Facebook's plan is to just have it easily exchangeable for one of those currencies or a multiple number of them. And so that would mean Facebook would guarantee supposedly that if you wanted that you could exchange your money back to kind of normal currency at any point you wanted to. But there's huge questions about how that would work. If this is a global currency, is it just going to be pegged to like to one other currency like the dollar, in which case that's going to that's going to upset a lot of countries that aren't America. And I think that, you know, however it's going to work, there are still going to be major concerns about the implications of this, but the stability of the financial system around the world. Yeah, interesting stuff, isn't it? I no doubt we will hear hopefully more detail on it with the launch. Thanks very much for speaking to us this morning. David Clark there, who's head of the campaign group, Positive Money.