this post was submitted on 09 Aug 2023
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Showerthoughts
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Money makes sense if you look at the history of it. People used to barter, but what if you didn't have what the other person needed? Valuable items were used as an intermediary when trading, like jewellery made of precious metal or just coins of precious metals.
Having a lot of money sitting around isn't safe so it went into a bank vault. The banks gave out slips to show how much money you had and people would trade these paper slips instead of the metal coins.
Eventually though the fractional banking system allowed money to be created from nothing, which meant the paper slips no longer represented precious metal in a vault. So now money doesn't represent anything besides a promise. Personally, I don't know if going back to trading bits of gold and silver really changes anything than trading bits of 0s and 1s.
It doesn't, nor would anyone choose to return to that paradigm. It may be forced upon society by a critical mass event. I think the more likely result, say 500 years in the future, is that no form of money exists. Think Star Trek. I just think there's too many people & not enough work to continue w/ paid labor that allows the idea of money to persist.