John, we are obviously in that convention already. <There is a convention of brilliant time travelling lateral thinkers on this week. >
The valuable item concealed in the 0s and 1s is trust.
In my life, that has been the most valuable item.
Value doesn't have to be tangible. Chickens, eggs, jewelry, goats, peas and gold in my teeth. Specifically, with humans, the most valuable things tend to not be tangible.
Love, music, hope, trust, happiness, friendship. We value these things so much more than chickens and goats, which I hasten to add is not to denigrate goats, chickens or even peas. Some of my best friends are goats and I do like peas.
One of the most important things is trust. Trust that we will be able to transact in future. Somebody will promise to do something in return for us later on when we want them to. Better still, for that promise to be fungible among all such promises given around the world.
So, we are on the same page.
In the relationships which matter most to me, there is no money changing hands. There is trust changing hands.
The problem is how to create trust in a world of thieves and gangsters. Gold is a traditional way. Nobody can change it. Gangsters and thieves can do a great business in it and many's the marauding, pillage and plunder in pursuit of other people's gold. Even as recently as 1929, there was a lot of gold drama as economies collapsed and gold surged around or was compulsorily held tight.
I say cyberspace is uniquely positioned to create trust. Which is primarily a matter of identity. Gold has no identity. It just is. Whoever happens to hold it is the owner. Proof of ownership is problematic.
Like Jay, you seem to have skipped over the essential point of the Q. There is something so welded to the base of people's brains that unless there's a material object attached, they can only think of the hyperinflation of the Weimar Republic and the idea of restraint is unimaginable.
The essential point is that it would be set at the median human's hour. Which is about as immutable as one can get and much more easily measured than a bunch of hedonic pricing of computers, cars, carrots and toothbrushes.
An hour is a very definite thing. A human is quite well defined. Getting somebody to do something for you is quite well defined too. Most people know how much they are paid. Some know quite precisely. The reason they know so well is because work is the manifestation of somebody else's will and freedom is the manifestation of one's own will.
So, if you offer me a 0 1 0 worth of pixels in exchange for me performing for you for an hour, I'll decline, because your pixels have no value. There's no mechanism for me to trust that they'll be repaid with goats, chickens or peas. Actually, I suspect that a pixelated promissory note from you would be worth having, but that's beside the point.
What mechanism is there to create trust in nothing but a string of pixelated 0s and 1s?
Uncle Al has achieved it. There has been nothing holding the US$ up for decades, other than trust that it'll be kept in stable form. That trust is founded on the military, economic, legal, political and other societal stability of the USA.
Which is fine for the USA, but it leaves the rest of us out in the cold. Sure, we have our local trash currencies. We lived in Belgium and trash currencies are a serious pain in the neck. They are expensive too. We had about 7 little jars with different currencies in them. Borders involved ripoff exchange rates. The only odd thing about the Euro is that it took the Europeans so long to create.
Similarly, the Q can solve the fungibility problem for the world. There is no global currency, other than gold. The USD is owned by the USA and they keep the profits of control. The USA could even effect political power through it if it becomes a fully digital medium with transactions approved by the Homeland Security crowd. I think they will already have been scoping out how to control US$ movement.
Worse, as the world's economy grows and Uncle Al prints another $trillion of USD, he, the government and citizens of the USA get to keep it for their own purposes. Which many people worry is the repression and domination of the rest of us. For self-protection of course, but that doesn't make our lives any better.
Trust in the Q would give the rest of us a piece of the action too, as well as avoiding exchange rate losses, fiscal drag by Uncle Al owning the money tree and political domination by a government - the ultimate Big Brother = 1984 writ very, very large.
Uncle Al and the USA can do it with the pixelated but anachronistic US$. So we can do it too, but much, much better.
Eventually of course, we'll have the Biggest Brother of all, It, and that will be the end of history. But that should take a century or so [things always take longer than I think they will]. We won't be able to do anything without It giving the say so. What's fascinating is that we will like that. We'll panic if left alone to decide for ourselves.
So, now you see.
The implementation part is the easy part. Getting to grips with ditching nationalism and local sea-shell currency is the hard part. Americans will be more befuddled than the British with the fall of the pound, loss of empire and the threat of metrication.
In NZ, in July 1987, we ditched the pound and invented the Kiwi dollar. It was a doddle. No more 20 shillings to the pound, 12 pennies to the shilling, 21 shillings to the guinea. Halfpennies soon went. Farthings, half and quarter farthings had long gone when I first dabbled in Xmas pudding and pulled out magical silver 3d and 6d.
Money has always had a magical quality to me. To think of money as goats, chickens, peas and gold is weird. It's so much more than that. Sure, I'd have thought a gold coin was simply amazing. Now pixels thrill me more than silver and gold did as a child. I've found a whole Xmas pudding chock full of pixels.
Once, I lost a bullet container [I think that's what it was - a leather pouch my father had in WWII] full of threepences which I'd saved by hard work [collecting bottles for recycling - there was 3d deposit on soft drink bottles and 1d on beer bottles]. Somebody stole it! Another time I buried a can of coins in the garden. But a year or two later, I couldn't remember where it was [or maybe a nasty older brother spied me and dug it up] and I never got it back. There is something unsafe about holding a can of coins, or gold.
As you can imagine, redundant servers full of pixels would be really safe. Provided there was trust.
Mqurice |
