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.

---

You can also vote for me as witness here:
https://steemit.com/~witnesses