What is Money?

2022 Sep 14

In the spiritual community, there is a famous non-physical entity called Bashar, who comes from another planet and has been awakening our consciousness for decades, channeled by an American, Darryl Anka. Bashar says there will be no existence of money in our society on the earth in the future because until that time our vibration will have become high enough that we won't need to rely on money as a medium of exchange; instead, every daily transaction occurs based on “synchronistic barter”, where as soon as you want something it will show up in your reality by you giving something else the other person wants. Yet I believe this will not happen in our lifetime, so we still need to consider money as a universal and effective means to exchange what each of us wants, for the time being.

So, without further ado, what is money?

First and foremost, when considering what money is all about, we need to be aware that anything can be money. I said “anything”, but it can happen only if that something has certain properties. These properties are: being durable, portable, fungible (i.e. my one dollar should be equivalent to your one dollar), divisible, verifiable (i.e. being easy to prove for it to be genuine money), and most importantly being scarce, which our modern governments completely fail by printing our money out of thin air and diluting the purchasing power of ours. Ideally, you should add, as a property for good money, having established history (how long that money has been trusted by people) and having censorship resistance (how much that money is resistant to other influential entities' control). If something has these properties, it can be money. The higher degree something has these properties, the better money it can be. Historically, seashells, salt, or gold and silver had been used as money by people.

So, with this understanding, you can notice that the modern money, which is controlled by our government and called fiat currency, is merely one option among other possible ones. This realization is crucial because we, who are living today, take the fiat currency for granted as money and it is this realization that gives us the opportunity to seek the possibility of creating an alternative societal structure other than nation-states. (Historically speaking, government paper money started to become predominant as universal mediums of exchange and store of values in the early 20th century, when nation-states powers were becoming predominant over the world.) And it is in the year 1971 that our world completely abandoned the Gold Standard and shifted into Fiat Standard when the United States President Richard Nixon declared that the US dollar was no longer redeemable for gold. As you can see, fiat currencies have only 51 years of history, which is interesting to notice when considering the fact that Bitcoin is now 13 years old as of this writing. I mean, fiat currencies themselves are also “experimental”, contrary to most people's expectations.

With all that said, since anything can be money theoretically, money essentially should be in “the free competition market”. Right now, it is monopolized by our government entities. Have you thought about why the currency you use daily is forced to be only your national currency issued by your government? Or have you thought about why iPhone devices developed by a company called Apple are sold fairly in the free competition market, like competing with Android devices developed by another company Google, but on the other hand currencies themselves are monopolized by our governments? We should think like this. Money is also goods, though it is a type of goods that only functions as neutral and universal goods for exchanging and storing values. There is no reason to stick with only one option, fiat currency, especially when these days alternatively feasible options have been emerging, namely, cryptocurrencies.

This viewpoint of mine is not a radical one because the possibility of issuing currencies aside from fiat currencies has been always discussed among economists historically —especially the book The Denationalization of Money by Friedrich Hayek, a Nobel prize laureate in economics, is where this possibility is discussed well. And, this viewpoint of mine is by no means unrealistic because we now have Crypto.