Mo' Money Mo' Problems: The Future of Finance?
I think it's becoming increasingly clear to anyone who has actually been paying attention that almost everyone is pretty much screwed at this point when it comes to money. Or maybe that's just the impression I get from what I have read. The banking system has more or less rotten from the inside, the government is increasingly revealed as corrupt, more and more rich people are putting more and more money into offshore tax havens, the gap between the wealthy 1% and the rest of the population is getting larger and larger, and yet at the same time the money that the 1% has is becoming increasingly worthless.
The current banking system cannot hold, and fortunately an alternative seems to have presented it's self from nowhere to save all the world's money, at least theoretically. Cyrptocurrency. It's actually pretty amazing that an unknown hacker came in from nowhere and introduced this whole new idea of money and pretty much vanished. Right now a single Bitcoin for example is worth about $700 and more and more individuals and companies are trading it and using it. Even traditional banks are increasingly interested in the idea of using the 'blockchain' for their own distributed ledgers.
But I am not going to sit here and say their aren't problems that need to be fixed. Cyrptocurrency is still to volatile, there are concerns of new quantum computers ruining the encryption scheme it relies on, it often can be used to make tracing the flow of money difficult and possibly could make tax avoidance even worse, regulation could crack down on it, 'forking' and other community disagreements could split the base too much... And yet it seems this underground economy is becoming more and more mainstream and I have heard some people say it may take the place of traditional government controlled fiat currency someday.
Overblown hype? Maybe. Maybe not. The idea that cash would one day totally be replaced by credit sticks was a really common trope in sci-fi and futurist ponderings and that never really ended up being true. This isn't quite the same thing though. Cyrptocurrency isn't simply an account being managed by a bank or central service somewhere, it's a system of distributed encrypted ledgers where everyone is always double checking everyone else's copy. It's harder to trace and some of the new Cyrptocurrencies offer complete anonymity to make it nearly impossible. It's probably perfectly possible to even print out paper versions of bitcoins with unique keys that can serve the same function as cash.
Could this really replace old forms of money? Maybe. But if it does we will have to think about what that means and how that would change things. If we remove the government's control of currency, do we also remove their ability to collect taxes? If not, how will they be calculated and collected? If so, is there a better way to fund public projects then taxation? If banks are either gone or decentralized to the point of not mattering much anymore, how will lones such be done? Could 'smart contracts' help any of these problems?
If you hear
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