Monday, January 13, 2014

Mind's Eye The evolution of money

Dear Members

I would like to share with you a new video I made. There is no new idea or information in this video. It is just some food for thought.
Money has evolved from barter, commodities, gold, paper, fiat, to Bitcoin. What is next?
The main question I would like to have discussed are the following:
What do you see as the future of money?
How will it function in the future?

The link to the video is below:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bMYKfOTyWks&list=UU9rOAPUfZe3KEja0vvFpe_A&feature=c4-overview

Evolution of money

In the beginning, 5,000 years ago, communities were small in size. They were very far apart and they had very few people in them. If you wanted to trade anything you had for something you wanted, you had to find people in your community who had what you wanted and wanted what you had. There were no constraints in what you used to barter with. As the communities grew in size, in numbers and in population, bartering got easier. You could trade with people even if they did not want or need what you had to trade with. All you had to do was convince them that there were many other people who would eventually want or need what you had, as long as it could be stored without going bad and losing its value and it could be easily transported to the other communities which could be far away.  Any commodity that was in high demand, like sea shells, herbs and salt, were used to barter with. Eventually gold, despite its many disadvantages, became the commodity of choice for bartering. Gold was difficult to divide into very small pieces needed to buy inexpensive items with. It was easy to cheat with because the scales used to weigh the small pieces of gold were much too unreliable. It was also insecure because it was too easy to steal. Some very clever people called bankers realized that they could exploit this weakness of gold by offering to securely store it and to print receipts for it guaranteeing that it could be redeemed on demand at any time by anyone. People began to use these receipts as a medium of bartering instead of using the actual gold. The receipts became known as "money". 

As bankers were very beneficial to society allowing them to conveniently, easily, securely and efficiently trade, people developed a trust and respect for them. Bankers abused this trust and exploited this respect by printing receipts for gold that they did not actually have. They evolved from helping society to helping themselves. Some used tally sticks instead of paper receipts to fight against counterfeiting. Sticks were engraved with notches and split in half along their grain to make it impossible to counterfeit. They stored the halves of the split talley sticks and allowed the other halves to be circulated and used as money. All that was necessary was to trust the person from whom you got your tally stick that they themselves got it from a trusted person and that the sticks had corresponding matching halves as proof that they were not counterfeited. The bankers eventually got so greedy that they stopped storing gold and concentrated on the much more lucrative business of storing and printing receipts based on trust only. They called their new money "fiat money" and printed as much of it as was needed for trade. Bankers became banksters. Because they printed more fiat money than was needed for trade, they used their newly acquired power and their resulting corruption to promote expensive wars that used this excess money to destroy entire cities and then to rebuild them. The banksters eventually got so wealthy and powerful that they began to be regarded as not only too big to fail, but also too big to nail.

Technology eventually developed to a point where "virtual reality" started to replace reality itself.  The world shrank and once more became like the small communities found 5,000 years ago. Some very clever people called mathematicians and computer programmers realized that they could exploit the power of the worldwide network of computers called the "internet" to invent a new form of virtual money called "Bitcoin" that had all the necessary attributes that ideal money must have. It was impossible to counterfeit and was easy to store and transport securely for as long and as far as needed; anywhere at any time to anyone. It was easy to divide in as small amounts as needed. It allowed anyone to be a bookkeeper to record all Bitcoin transactions. The ledger of all transactions was kept by so many volunteer bookkeepers that it became impossible for any one bookkeeper to falsify it. The amount of Bitcoin issued was defined by a protocol that could not be changed by greedy banksters. For the first time, the control of the people's money was decentralized and freed from the control of the greedy and corrupt banksters. The people were finally able to be their own banks and recaptured the control of bartering that they had at the very beginning 5,000 years ago.         


--
 
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups ""Minds Eye"" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to minds-eye+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.

0 comments:

Post a Comment