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Decoding E-Money Is Here

By: Graham Iddon


January 3, 2018
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The new Museum’s first special exhibition

In the Money exhibition

Our first travelling exhibition was In The Money, which premiered in our old space in 2013.

Voices from the Engraver exhibition

Next on tour was Voices from the Engraver, shown here at the Sherbrooke Nature and Science Museum.

Unlike renovating a house, when we closed the Museum for its four-year re-invention, we couldn’t just “stay” at another museum until the water got turned back on. Or could we have? In fact, once the renovation was under way, that’s essentially what we did. Though we didn’t sleep on anybody’s couch, we did create a travelling exhibitions program to keep the virtual doors open while the actual doors were closed. We stayed at museums from Kitimat, B.C., to Gimli, MB, and from Timmins, ON, to Chicoutimi, QC, and we still have a few bookings available for 2019. Now that we are again back in our own house, we’ve invited one of our wandering exhibitions home for a visit: Decoding E-Money.

Decoding E-Money electric sign

Decoding E-Money fits snugly in our exhibition space outside the entrance to the permanent galleries.

exhibition and seats

The exhibition relies on a lot of screens and was designed to be dark and immersive, as if you were inside the digital processes.

exhibition and artifact panels

The rear view shows the artifact zone—a nice, analog relief from the heavily digital zones.

As the title suggests, this exhibition aims to remove the confusion about what exactly e‑money is. It’s important to make the distinction between what people think of as e‑money and what, in fact, it is. In a backgrounder on its website, the Bank of Canada defines e‑money as

…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.

Despite their fully electronic environments, debit cards, e‑mail transfers and credit cards are not examples of e‑money. They are methods of payment that follow electronic pathways along which transaction information travels. It might be more helpful to imagine e-money as money that has been withdrawn from a bank account and stuffed into an envelope waiting to be spent. The “envelope” just happens to be an electronic device.

subway style map with monitors

Our payments system map is a fun interactive that, with moving lights, shows you the route your money takes using five different payment methods.

boy at a colourful touch panel

Our hands-on timeline explores the relevant history of the money and technology that led to e-money.

kids sitting at a game kiosk

Up to four people at a time can test their knowledge of e-money and its technological background by playing a fun true-or-false game.

The version of e‑money we are most concerned with in this exhibition is cryptocurrency and, specifically, the ever-newsworthy Bitcoin. You can purchase it using your national currency, and it can be sold for currency, but in between it acts all by itself as a token of exchange that exists entirely online. Bitcoin doesn’t actually meet the criteria for a currency, but its underpinning technology, called the blockchain, is ground-breaking—a system that allows for secure transactions without third-party oversight. We studied it for you so that you can explore it too.

Like its mother museum, Decoding E‑money has a great number of interactive features. It is, fittingly, a very digital exhibition, with games, a timeline, videos and interpretive content all accessed using touch panels and computer consoles. The only significant part of the display that is not digital is the artifact zone, a breath of old-fashioned air in a very modern exhibition. Here, you will see money that was, in its day, as difficult for some to accept as digital currencies are today. To help visitors explore in-depth information about these artifacts, we provide you with a book, an appropriately low-tech medium.

three boys at a video game terminal

A fast-moving break from the exhibit is the cryptocurrency mining game. How fast can you find the right code?

inside of a blue kiosk

The big central cylinders are all about cryptocurrency.

So please drop by the Museum and check out Decoding E money. It will be in our special exhibitions space until May 6, 2018.

We want to hear from you! Do you have an idea for a blog post you’d like to see?
Content type(s): Blog posts

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The Museum Blog

February 14, 2014

We’re the Currency Museum, not the Mint

By: Graham Iddon


If we had a nickel for every time people asked questions like that, we’d have… Well, I suppose we have roughly that number of nickels already; we have a long history as a currency museum after all. When the museum was open, somebody would ask a similar question several times a week.
Content type(s): Blog posts
October 7, 2013

The Cases are Almost Empty

By: Graham Iddon


For the first time since they went into their cases in 1980, over 2000 coins, notes, beads and shells are coming back out. The Museum’s curatorial staff are busily pulling panels from cases, placing coins into specially prepared drawers and sliding notes into acid-free Mylar envelopes.
Content type(s): Blog posts
September 24, 2013

Curators Begin Removal of Artifacts

By: Graham Iddon


The doors were barely closed following Big Top Farewell event before Chief Curator Paul Berry and his team began emptying display cases that had been sealed shut since 1980. The biggest task involved removing more than 2500 bank notes from the room we knew as Gallery 8.
Content type(s): Blog posts
September 6, 2013

First Artifacts to Leave the Museum: And they were big

By: Graham Iddon


Before the museum closed for renovations on 2 July, technicians began to remove the heavier artifacts in late May. First to go was the strong box. Built of ¼” thick welded steel plates, this trunk was used by the Bank of Upper Canada in Toronto between 1821 and 1866.
Content type(s): Blog posts
June 21, 2013

Farewell to the Currency Museum c.1980

By: Graham Iddon


The roots of the Currency Museum go back to 1959 when the then Governor of the Bank of Canada, James Coyne, proposed the idea of establishing a currency collection that would reflect the colourful monetary history of Canada. By the time the go-ahead was given in 1963 by Coyne’s successor, Louis Rasminsky, the collection’s mandate had been expanded to include world monetary history, banking and production artifacts and a numismatic library.
Content type(s): Blog posts
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