Once upon a time, English teachers who couldn’t think of anything else to do with their classes always had “the life story of a penny” to fall back on. Roald Dahl remembers having to do it once for “prep”. In his version, a lump of copper is excavated from a South American mine, shipped to England, melted down and cruelly stamped with the king’s head before passing through the hands of bankers, a housewife, a fishmonger and several clumsy boys. Take a walk down my local high street in Hull and you’ll see the story of money alright – the lack of it, anyway: potholes in the road that stay unfixed for years, the homeless and rootless huddled in the doorways of takeaways and vacant shop units, the well-stocked pawn shops and bargain supermarkets with cardboard cut-out coppers in their windows to deter shoplifters.
HullCoins well spent? City’s ‘Bitcoin for volunteers’ offers a new way to pay
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