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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 It might be more helpful to imagine e-money as money that has been withdrawn from a bank account and stuffed into an envelope waiting to be spent.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

March 22, 2023

Security is in the bank note

By: Graham Iddon


Collage, photo of wild west street, old bank notes, old counterfeiting brochure.
Security printing is a game of anticipating and responding to criminal threats. Counterfeiting is a game of anticipating and responding to bank note design. This cat and mouse relationship affects every aspect of a bank note.
Content type(s): Blog posts Subject(s): Economy, Financial literacy Grade level(s): Grade 07 / Secondary 1, Grade 08 / Secondary 2, Grade 09 / Secondary 3, Grade 10 / Secondary 4, Grades 11 and 12 / Secondary 5 and CEGEP
December 6, 2022

Money: it’s a question of trust

By: Graham Iddon


Photo collage, parking meter, old bank notes and an early bank card.
The dollars and cents we use wouldn’t be worth anything to anybody if we didn’t have confidence in it. No matter if it’s gold or digits on a hard drive, public trust is the secret ingredient in a successful currency.
Content type(s): Blog posts Subject(s): Economy
June 16, 2022

Army bills: Funding the War of 1812

By: David Bergeron, Graham Iddon


In 1812, British North America had no banks and little currency. With the prospect of war drying up supplies of coins, the government of Lower Canada decided to issue legal tender notes called “army bills” to pay for troops and supplies.
Content type(s): Blog posts Subject(s): Economy, History
May 5, 2022

Between tradition and technology

By: Graham Iddon


Collage, man at an easel, paintings of birds and a goose illustration with comments written on it.
What was proposed was a complete about-face from the philosophy behind recent security printing. If photocopiers could easily deal with the colours and designs of the current series, then the next series should be bold and simple.
Content type(s): Blog posts
February 3, 2022

Queen of the bank notes

By: Graham Iddon


Few of us have ever met her, and it’s likely none of us are even remotely related to her. Yet, Canadians have carried her picture in their wallets for generations now. She’s Queen Elizabeth II and has been our monarch for over 70 years.
Content type(s): Blog posts
December 2, 2021

The true value of money

By: Graham Iddon


Photo collage, old bank notes and coins, gold nuggets and a computer component.
What is money—when you really stop to think about it? To understand how money works, and what it ultimately represents, we need to strip it down to its very basic function.
Content type(s): Blog posts Subject(s): Economy Grade level(s): Grade 07 / Secondary 1, Grade 08 / Secondary 2, Grade 09 / Secondary 3, Grade 10 / Secondary 4, Grades 11 and 12 / Secondary 5 and CEGEP
October 21, 2021

Moving mountains

By: Graham Iddon


Collage, bank note details, green, face of middle-aged woman, mountains and large number 20.
The $20 bill of 1969 was the prototype of the Scenes of Canada note series. Yet, as more notes were designed, the theme—and the $20 note itself—would change.
Content type(s): Blog posts
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