What Is the Future of Money?
@amaterasusolar feels we should just get rid of money. But, can we do that? Could we do that in the future?
Will bitcoin be the money in the future?
Will we go back to using gold to buy things?
The future is actually much stranger.
And bitcoin is only money for a little while.
And gold becomes just a pretty yellow metal.
We use specie because we have no trust
We live in a society where if we trust too much, we can end up seriously impaired. In high trust societies, we can trust fellow strangers with our luggage, but we cannot trust that other people will not be lazy. It is so easy to be lazy, and to avoid being productive.
It is also so easy to scam trusting people. The Fed, and the banks print money by stealing people's work through inflation. (I wish they were just making money out of thin air) And the scams perpetuate out in every layer of our society. What is worse is that many of them are protected by "the law". Some even say that that is what govern-cement exists for, to protect the monopolies, to enforce the lines in between the gangs.
So, we need a way of accounting for energy and our time. And, currently we do that mostly with digital specie. (fiat dollars) In this way, no one is draining the system too much. (supposedly, but then govern-cement came in and started supporting people to not work)
This is why we have what we have.
What happens in the future?
We now have bitcoin. We now have block-chain and cryptographic authentication. With these, we do not need to have trust in any man, we can trust the system and math.
However, this is still specie. And, it doesn't have any of the properties that money should have. Properties that make all the ones we typically list when talking about money small in comparison.
In games like Monopoly someone always ends with all the money. Even a game where you flip a coin, it ends with someone having all the coins. There must be enough specie out there to keep transactions working/flowing. But, the tendency when specie exists is to hoard it. And this is only taken care of by the society insisting that the people with lots fund public works, for public praise.
So, bitcoin will seriously help with getting rid of inflation, and encourage saving. However, it does not solve the hording issue, nor the issue when one or both parties in a transaction doesn't have any bitcoin. That was one the greatest problems in the Great Depression, that towns had no money. As in, there was one $5 bill in town.
Bitcoin will seriously help, but it is only during the transition phase. Then, our understanding of money increases, our economy completely transforms and the way we interact changes drastically.
The future economy
Many say that robotics will take over all the jobs, and thus leave humans with nothing but free time. …and thus we won't need money. Neither of these are true, and the logic is seriously flawed, but that is because we take so many things for granted in our current economy, that will not be true in the future.
After we migrate to join our "family", our tribe, things really change. The economy will change to one like you might envision with a bunch of small city-states. The small communities will be very self sufficient. And thus, we won't have Wallymarts. No cheap goods made in China, or anywhere else. People will demand the best quality AND that it be completely recyclable and repairable.
The large factories will be a thing of the past. That future "vision" of giant factories with thousands of robots building things will never come to fruition. Consumerism falls apart before then, and Distributed Manufacturing becomes a thing, a standard, ubiquitous thing.
So, what kind of economy exists? Something more like a B2B where tribes exchange things that they make for trade with other tribes that make what they want/need.
And this leads to a "barter" economy, with lots of AI helping. Where the computers keep track, and help balance trade flows. Make sure no one group is being taken advantage of. And helping everyone to get what they want.
Then there will be "art work" and that will be exchanged for favors (or something like that). These are things that are not easily created, because they take someone of significant skill and talent. So, we are talking about an artists' time. And this will seem like a whole separate economy, with its own special "money". Where the creator makes the item AND the "money" is created when the item is "sold", and then disappears when the creator gets something in return, from the system. This might turn out to me much more like we describe trading favors, then anything like money/CCs/Banks we have today.
So, the essentials will be provided to each person, within the "family"/tribe by the tribe. And the tribe will figure out how to motivate people and distribute chores. And the niceties that cannot be produced locally will be traded/exchanged for.
Basically everything about the economy is changed.
And so, our current problems of welfare, taxes, homeless, lack of money… just go away. Or, maybe it should be said that they will be dealt with locally by the tribe. And not every tribe will handle things the same.
The "national government" becomes more of a volunteer, helping organization. With people that are really the best and the brightest. Who only come when asked. And come, get serious hands on involved, and help with finding solutions.
So, you might say that "money" is gotten rid of. As in, if you are a normal person, growing food, and working in the "family" factory, you may never see or use any money. But that is because exchanges for raw resources and finished goods is handled by an AI barter system, which will be handled by the bookkeepers of the community.
However, that money is gone is not true, it will have transformed into something based on each person's worth. This money will have properties that we can't even fathom today.
Banksters would cry and weep and gnash their teeth as i regale them with tales of this future money.