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 .
What I tend to like about Cryptos, it's a chance to reset the system a little. Right now, the Pareto chart for Government backed currencies is stacked in only a few people's favor. Cryptos are offering a chance to reset the system with wealth in the hands of the people, not a centrally controlled currency that is ripe for manipulation. Steem especially appeals to me, because people who are actual contributors, and people actually doing real things that are helpful can get rewarded. We can, in an uncontrolled democratic system, allocate where "wealth" and money should go. It's really a paradigm shift for who gets "money".
Nothing more encourages me about crypto.
I just find it difficult to imagine the system being reset absent vigorous opposition by those whose fortunes are at stake. Given the outrageous business that is conducted profitably, the millions that die every year as a result of manipulations of war, justice, and every feature of government that can conceivably be corrupted, the idea that computer information might utterly and peacefully render such a system extinct seems naive.
I'm all in, but my eyes are wide open.
I think mass adoption of crypto currencies by the mainstream is still quite some way away. We still have a major war to get through yet, and then the recovery from that.
There will be a section of society - the early adopters, who will do well because they got in early. but your average person on the street who currently knows nothing about crypto will be in the same position they are in now.
Crypto will bring wealth and freedom to some, but to the masses it will simply be the same old thing in a different form.
Instead of holding your paper money, the banks will hold your crypto. It will be illegal to have it stored anywhere else eventually.
These days, and those to come in the near future will be seen as the golden years of freedom for crypto, before banks and countries found ways to control it and regulate it and profit from it.
I don't mean to be negative, and I'm excited to be dipping a very small toe into the crypto pond, but I can't see those in power just rolling over and letting this sort of freedom go unchecked.
After the shooting war, there will be a crypto war, and only the quick and agile will survive that one.
As gloomy as this is, it may be plausible.
I don't mean to be a downer, but I'm seeing so much stuff on Steemit about how the blockchain will free everybody and make everybody rich.
The world just isn't like that. It may be cool technology, and it may being wealth and freedom to some, but to most it won't change a thing for them.
Hmmmm.......... I feel a reality check post coming on...... hehehe
While I think my scenario is more likely, I prefer your scenario. ;-)
Technology usually changes the way humans are doing stuff, not the way humans are. Greed, fear, anger, compassion, all these are human traits and they are the consequence of the decision we, humans, take.
Very true. ;-)
In a round about way that's what I was getting at in my post today where I said that blockchain technology won't change things for a lot of people.
Mainly because people and their drivers won't change.
I was possibly a bit too morbid for Steemit at that hour of the morning ;-)
Interesting thoughts.
"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 need the app.
Thanks!
the future is here, it's just not evenly distributed.
so is Basic Income.
thanks for reminding me that quote, I couldn't say it better :)
the name of the guy who said it escapes me...but I think it's appropriate.
oh...your numbers are off by a huge factor...it's not 30/300 years...more like 30months 3000 years.
you know more than me have fast tech is advancing.
I keep thinking that when i was born a terra byte of computer storage could not be had for ANY amount of money...and today my wife has a terra byte drive on her (cheap) laptop.. The future is arriving at warp speed.
Not so long ago a new Geospatial representation of the world was introduced to the intarwebz: Microsoft's Terraserver, highly trumpeted because it was comprised of over a terabyte of data.
I'm looking forward to the day when something like Golem creates a cloud of the net, and we can trust thin clients. IPFS is an amazing concept that promises to practically eliminate excessive redundancy on the net and speed access to data using torrential hashing to connect nodes to data, rather than addresses.
Moore's Law seems to not be an exponential enough expression of growth rates of data capacity.
the angle of the dangle is vertical
the speed, the acceleration is increasing.
It's part of the sytem to control people to depend on money. Money itself don't hold any value and wealth is not money but thing which brings money for you! Thanks for the post. Upvoted!
Great content ,thank you for sharing
Really interesting post, appreciated. Followed ;)
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