Turkey, lacking perspective, puts a stamp on history as the country with the most expensive and restricted Internet.

I hate watching news programs lately. There is always a politician talking about something that amounts to a hill of beans. The political class sounds like kids making sand castles at the beach, having their fun. But they are not from the twenty-first century, for sure; because the kids of the present century do not waste time making sand castles. I just learned that my nephew, Mert, has been writing algorithms to earn bitcoins. I remember his infancy! The kids of the twenty-first century are having their fun in front of their computers. Mert, for instance, has opened his computer to foreign companies. He writes algorithms for American and Chinese companies for data procedures, earns bitcoins, that is, electronic Internet money, and converts them to US dollars for spending. He is considering financing a university education in the US this way. The kids of this generation are completely different than we were. Mert is only sixteen, a second-year high school kid in Ankara. Meanwhile, we are listening to the politicians of the twentieth century tell us why we owe them everything we have today, including our very survival. Empty talk!

So, how does Mert make money? The daily volume of Forex transactions is worth about $5.3 trillion, according to a figure from April 2013. In 2007 it was around $3 trillion. The global crisis has not limited Forex trade. Indeed, it has almost doubled. Mert benefits from the growing volume of Forex trade, in other words, from globalization. But how exactly?

If I was asked what the cornerstone of the world was today, I would say “the accounting system.” Billions of transactions take place every day from banking transactions to credit card transactions, buying plane tickets, booking hotel rooms, shipping thousands of containers and trading equities. All of these are done online. You need to record multiple entries within an entire accounting system for a single of these transactions. Just think about it: you buy an electronic book online from a London-based company using your credit card while you are sitting at your desk in Ankara. Here is the transaction step by step: your bank in Turkey records the sum as payable in TL terms, the dollar value of the sum is calculated, the dollar sum is recorded as receivable in the seller’s account. At least six accounting procedures are run for a single transaction, all of which requires computer time. Companies prefer to outsource these data procedures because it is cheaper. They post such jobs on a website. So that’s how Mert earns money.

What are the qualifications required for this job? Obviously, you have to own a computer. Second, you have to speak English. Third you have to know mathematics and how to write commands when necessary. Nothing else. I am wondering, if sixteen year old kids are able to do all these things, what is the purpose of software engineering programs at universities?

How about the bitcoin thing? Recently, digital currencies have come to be commonly used as payment instrument. Bitcoin is one of them. It is convertible to any currency like a regular currency. Daily bitcoin exchange rates are posted everywhere online. No one asks what government issues bitcoins. The entire bitcoin system represents another accounting entry, actually. Of course, authoritarian countries and innovation-centered countries approach the bitcoin system differently. China, for instance, has banned the use of bitcoins for financial transactions, in fear that something outside of state control might happen. The central banks of Singapore and Finland, on the other hand, have declared that they will not interfere since bitcoin is not a currency, but a commodity. They are basically saying, “you are free to take the risk, but we don’t take any responsibility.”

This is the direction of change in the world today. Meanwhile, Turkey, lacking perspective, puts a stamp on history as the country with the most expensive and restricted Internet. It appears that the twentieth century politicians are having difficult time understanding the twenty-first century. Does it matter? Not really.

This commentary was published in Radikal daily on 31.01.2014