Thanks to the web and net, institutions lose their credibility. In my observation, this applies to governments, banks, the judiciary, Social Services and the Police as well as governmental funding agencies.
Comes along the next generation with programming skills and a spirit of enterprise and crowdfunding is born. Of course, it is earlier / bigger / better in the US, but in the UK there are supposed to be 44 platforms available, too. A most comprehensive US site is crowdsourcing with excellent reports.
The cultural and thus institutional attitude to “money” differs widely between the US and the UK. But neither ultimately appreciate the dishonesty of turning credit from thin air [bank generated at a price] into cash [government generated interest-free].
When inventors, artists and entrepreneurs discover that neither funding nor the protection of their Intellectual Property (IP) work, because it’s all only made for institutions and big companies, everybody must rejoice in these online alternatives. Here’s an excellent UK directory.
In the Spirit of the Forum for Stable Currencies