Like A Rock

Only the Rocks Live Forever.

A Native American saying popularized in the book "Centennial".  The rest of it is:  It matters not how long you live but how you live.

Rocks are not smart but we are if we perceive them to be endowed with a life that lives forever and we are not then rocks teach us something?  Not the rock itself.    We teach something to ourselves thinking about a rock and learn from it.  Rocks live forever in a temporal world, at least as far as we are concerned because we do not.  However there are lives beyond this one.  Is that a concept or reality?

It all depends on your user view.  The point is that we think about a rock in conceptual terms and that concept leads to even higher level conceptual structures headed toward the spiritual realm or toward the direction of conceptual expression of what a rock is in the physics realm.  Some say it is just waves there.  Maybe either way it is as real as real gets despite how many steps it is from what we perceive to be a rock on the ground.

Rocks are solid.  I can say that about them.  With all our conceptual thinking we like to be grounded with a solid thing at the base.  A walk in the woods.  Touching the earth.  From there we can take off into flights of fantasy, poetry or the study of biology.  Maybe the only solid thing at the base of all this is our mind and our perception of consciousness.  Some people think that.  I think therefore I am.  In any event we all like some thing, even if it is a thought, to cling to like a rock.

Gold is solid.  Heavy.  Rare too.  Hard work or good luck to find.  Good as gold.  It has played a role as money.  It cannot be reproduced, created by some mysterious means, diminished, diluted and remain pure.  Purity is a factual test.  Its safety is inherent in what it is and our trust in that.

We are conceptual beings.  Rock solid concepts concepts are materialize in their relationship to our lives.  Can a computer record have all the attributes of gold?  Can the logical concept of gold be separated from its inherent physical reality and be called as good as gold without its physical connection?

If it could it might as well be considered as gold.  It would conceptually live forever without change.  At least as long as there is anybody left to hold the concept.  What if all the ones and zeros that represent the concept went out of existence at a point in time?  Is it lost?  At that point in time yes but it can be reconstructed from a history backup, as long as that exists.  If it is as bad as that then the record will not have much meaning anyhow, nor will gold.  That unthinkable event is why the networked internet was initially created.  An attempt to protect our communications and information structure from nuclear disaster.

I don't think that it should be too hard to convince those that support gold as a foundation for money that a virtual record of money is as good as gold or good enough to be considered virtual gold.

Just define all the real properties of gold and its conceptual attributes as money.  Then see if they can't be reproduced on a computer.  The only difference being that the building blocks of gold in the physical world are matters of physics and the building blocks in the conceptual computer world are ones and zeros.

If the all the conceptual attribute of gold can be transferred to a computer as a conceptual object then compare the benefits of using gold as a medium of exchange to using a conceptual representation of the attributes of gold existing on a computer.

If the computer record is as good as gold and facilitates the function and purpose of money better than gold then the choice is obvious.