Money Will Never Be The Same. Again.
Have you ever thought how to explain money to a person from the 16th century?
To be honest, I just made this exercise. It went rather weird.
Here's my try:
All you wealth: cattle, crops, land and houses is changeable against a special kind of paper. If your wealth is bigger, then you get more paper sheets, or paper with bigger numbers on it. If you have less wealth, you will get less paper sheets, or paper sheets with smaller numbers on it.
So, once again, in case you didn’t get it: all your wealth is on paper sheets with numbers on them.
Now here comes the funny part: if you want your wealth to be safe, you have to give it to somebody else to store it. We’ll call this person “a banker”. Not only you will have to give it away to him, but you will also have to pay him a certain amount of your own paper. You will do that every month. We will call this payment “a commission”. The banker can do whatever he wants with your papers, but once you ask them back, he must give them to you. If he still has them, that is. Chances are that he will not have them, or he will not have them all. In this case, he will return only a “guaranteed amount”. So you give to him 100 papers, but he is required by the rule of law to give you back a maximum of 10. The rest may be lost.
How would you think the person will react?
I’m going to save you this chore: he will react as if you were crazy. And, to his context, you will be crazy. You will be so out of the normal way of managing wealth, that you will be considered insane.
Money In The (Oh, So Near) Future
Let’s try to jump forward 30-40 years. At the current pace of technological and social advance, 30-40 years may be the equivalent of 300-400 years ago. So we can expect pretty much the same level of “progress”.
First of all, I think money will have a few more characteristics to it.
Depreciation / Appreciation Speed
Probably the most important will be what I call “depreciation / appreciation speed”. This characteristics will be almost deterministic. We will know each moment how much time the value of our tokens will stay the same. Maybe we will have tokens printed for a day or two, and they will hold value only for a day or two. And if you won’t spend it, they will be literally just numbers in a blockchain. And maybe we will have tokens which are “guaranteed” to hold their value for at least 3-4 weeks. After that, we will have to find a different token.
Preferred Routes
Second, I think money will have “preferred routes”. As more methods of storing value are getting implemented, and as AI becomes more and more effective, we may see value traveling through money at light speed: it gets converted to bitcoin, then to ethereum, then to ZCash, because this route give 1.27% more profit then all the other potential routes. I think these routes will become longer and longer and they’ll include other types of assets: smart contracts, digital ventures and so on. The value of a token may be evaluated by how many routes are “crossing” it. Ethereum, for instance, gets “crossed” more and more, as more tokens are built on top of its infrastructure.
I'm A Billionaire, Baby, You Just Don't Get It, Yet
And third, I think money will become more and more personal, as the number of currencies is exponentially growing and as the speed of depreciation (or appreciation) increases and as ‘preferred routes’ will become more and more accessible with regular tools (your phone, or your neural link). So instead of thinking in terms of “he is a billionaire” - and assuming that he is billionaire in dollars - we will think: “he has a very potent portfolio of tokens, with small depreciation speed and profitable preferred routes”.
Wealth, as a concept, will become extremely fluid and inconsistent.
And yes, I think we will have some form of UBI (Universal Basic Income). I just don’t know yet how it will manifest exactly.
I'm a serial entrepreneur, blogger and ultrarunner. You can find me mainly on my blog at Dragos Roua where I write about productivity, business, relationships and running. Here on Steemit you may stay updated by following me @dragosroua.
https://steemit.com/~witnesses
When countries' central banks printed all the cash, the state got all the proceeds. Now with the new digital currencies, the founders and early adopters get all the proceeds.
nope
I was just discussing this with my wife, now i can just refer her to this page. Thank you, great article. i am following
Had a multi year friendly disagreement with a guy i work beside who is a Gold and Silver bug and also invests in top 100 shares. He will never touch crypto and i don't blame him as you should never invest in something you don't believe in. The guy is constantly predicting the fad with crypto will disappear as soon as the regulators start cracking down. This guy will never accept crypto as money. I never try to explain just keep showing him the BTC charts /price which seems to aggravate him immensely. I think i need to stop as i don't want to turn into that annoying boastful guy showing off. I sold most of my BTC @ $750 but haven't told him yet its just too much fun seeing his envy.
very true....and imagine what happens to those with money find themselves much poorer as their currency depreciates (like the US dollar will)
Yes, it happened a lot through history. There was a time when people holding gold (the metal) were the richest. Now people with more numbers in the bank are richer than all the gold in the world.
Interesting post, but you've gone a bit overboard with the hyperbole re: banks don't you think? A bank defaulting on depositors is extremely rare, whereas quite a few crypto exchanges have either defaulted or come very close to it. Anyway, I think we can all agree that crypto is the future and the future is going to be very exciting!
Also, you might find this small piece I wrote on the past interesting ...
In the country where I was born (and currently life, at least 10 months per year), Romania, that is, we did have a few banks defaulting, so that's my personal experience. It also happened on a larger scale in Cyprus, recently, if I'm not mistaken.
Correct!
I do think money changes from the current fiat money system. I don't know if crypto's will be the ultimate future, but they will lead the way until the governments can get their act together.
What a great way to explain our current banking system to peole.
Good article, what a ridiculous concept we have allowed ourselves to be enslaved with in these times.
Great article, thanks @dragosroua! Voted for you, gave you my proxy.
Thank you, appreciate it :)
It is already happening... here at Steemit with transactions time less than 3 seconds... money is travelling at lightening fast...just mass adoption of SBD and awareness is required. Very interesting post @dragosroua .