Overview

Fifteen-year-old Jennie Stockitt struggles to score well in her economics tests, but a series of dreams come to her rescue. Jennie's alter ego, Drennie, leads her on the journey from ancient barter, through old and new commercial practices, to modern-day blockchain, cryptocurrencies and 'future-proofing'. She wanders through concepts like supply and demand, inflation, opportunity cost, and trade-offs. She learns about money, value, worth, wealth and trade. And she solves crimes of fraud, forgery and theft. This book is about so much more than money, commerce, finance and economics. It describes, in amusing and accessible detail - without the use of confusing charts, tables and graphs - the life-lessons the characters learn as they stumble across the facts, fallacies, scams and shams that exist in the world as we know it today.

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9780620914680

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John Hofmeyr's debut novella From Barter to Bitcoin follows unpublished works that include two short ghost stories, a Christmas pageant narrated from the donkey's viewpoint, a hymn, some benedicites, and a few poems. John has retired from twenty-five years in the industrial chemistry and process engineering industries and ten in the business of electricity and water distribution hardware. For the past fifteen years, he has been involved in biochar - using charcoal to improve soil fertility (and other applications) - while simultaneously sequestering atmospheric carbon as a Negative Emission Technology; John's little contribution to saving the world. Some of his techno-commercial work is published on the Researchgate web site. John drank freely from the fountains of knowledge at the University of Hard Knocks. His industrial career gave free rein to try out novel products and procedures and the freedom to make mistakes and learn from them. He solved a challenging variety of techno-commercial problems that led to profitable businesses. Perhaps that's the mould in which the protagonist in this book is cast. Problem-solving opened many doors for John. Business invitations have taken him to diverse destinations, including the US Bureau of Mines, the electricity and water utilities in Rwanda, Uganda, Jordan and Palestine, Washington DC (to present a paper on the prepaid metering of water at the World Bank), and London for South Africa Day at the Royal Society. He was also invited by Iraqi electricity utilities to lecture on prepaid electricity coupled with load management. The no-fly restrictions required more than 1100 miles of taxi rides from Amman to Baghdad and back again. As a memento, he still has his quaint Iraqi visa that makes no reference to his surname. The travels were seldom fun but inevitably instructive. John lives quietly in Johannesburg, South Africa.

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