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RE: 100 years ago, Henry Ford proposed ‘energy currency’ to replace gold - CoinTelegraph
How interesting that it was a natural position for Ford that details about the value of the energy currency would be worked out with congress!
Yeah, I noticed that too. Some related thoughts that crossed my mind when I was reading these articles last night:
Without a consensus mechanism like Bitcoin's proof of work, force of law was really the only way that something like this would even have been conceivable.
As a centralized solution to the problem, along with any good it might have done for society, Ford was also putting himself at the center of it... a nice little potential for conflict of interest. Maybe it was a noble endeavor, or maybe he was just a robber-baron with noble sounding ideas. ;-)
I'm not sure what made him think that the same people who were running the wars would turn around and support a currency that ended their ability to do so. That might well have been the fatal weakness in his plan.
Yeah, some of this occurred to me too. I thought that 1) true to his words, the idea really would have been simply to replace currency with units of energy while retaining the rest of the mechanisms that dictated control, etc while 2) shifting the balance of power toward capitalist centers, essentially away from banks to energy manufacturers (which would benefit a different segment of society perhaps, but not in a truly decentralized way). And 3) I wonder if he was betting on the idea that wars could be replaced by a more profitable venture.
It would be interesting to find more from Ford directly about the idea.
I definitely agree with this. I would also really like to know what Edison's connection was to the idea, if any. It seems weird that the article mentioned Ford & Edison visited the plant, but then said nothing else about Edison.