In the fantasy monetary system every single uniquely serialized digital dollar resides on a central server with an association to a uniquely identified monetary system user. As the user makes makes transactions with their money the identity of the holder of that money changes.
That means a great magnitude of money changing hands in any given time period!
No, not really, if you consider relative orders of magnitude. All that money changing hands, trillions of dollars, is not that much. Compared to what? Trillion of dollars sounds big considering the value we place on just one dollar but it is only big in terms of relative value. As far as a number goes, the absolute total of all units of value called dollars is small as are the number of transactions involving the change in possession of these dollars
Compared to what? The speed of light. Brain cells in our heads. The firing of their synapses per unit of time. The number of unique packets of information sent over the internet between sending and receiving computers?
A trillion dollars here, a trillion dollars there. When you get to amounts that are better expressed in numbers with exponent values then you are talking about real big numbers!
Consider the internet. Information flowing all over the world. Actually flowing in little pieces. Pieces called packets. It is amazing how these packets encapsulate information and pass them from a sender to a receiver over the internet. Exactly how I communicate from myself to some one else over the internet is amazing.
Each packet is simple. In simplest form it has a header, a payload and a footer. The payload is an specified amount of information in bits and bytes. The total amount of information to be passed over the internet is broken into these little packets for transmission.
How Things Work explains internet packets in simple terms. There are increasingly complex explanations all the way to the level that only a genius could understand. The simple one will do.
You may think that a monetary system that manages the storage and transactions of units of money as uniquely serialized digital dollars with a denomination of one is an unmaageable way to structure a money system. Unmanageable compared to storage and transactions based on unique numerical totals of the money stored in an individual bank account or the total amount of money involved in any transaction like buying groceries with a credit card.
This is the age of computer information. The old way of managing totals of money in an account or totals in a money transactions was an accounting function handled by book keepers. Book keepers have gone the way of switchboard operators! We had to aggregate information into high level packets in the past. Packets of a size dictated by the ability of a person to manage them. The information age has dis-aggregated information to levels processed by a computer machine and networks of computer communications.
Because we have always looked at money in one way we continue to look at it in the same way. It is our user view of the money system. We can continue to view our money as being a lump sum in our account at a bank. Receiving it in the total amount of a paycheck deposited in an account and adding to the total balance or spending it with a credit card in given total amount subtracting it from the total in the bank account.
The way we look at anything is called a user view. My user view of looking at what I am typing on this blog is letters on a computer screen. So much easier than writing them on a piece of paper with a pen. The computer's user view of what I am writing is totally different. It is ones and zeros that it organizes in a fashion that can be transformed back into what I am typing so I can see it in terms of my input user view. Much easier than me reading the machine code that the computer looks at. I could look at it and translate it from bits and bytes if I had to but that is not the most efficient view for me. It is for the computer.
The money system used to have to look at money as totals of units because it was constrained by employee resources to look at money totals in an aggregate manner. Now it is done by machines, communicated by machines. It is not constrained to look at money or process money in the same we we, in our human user view, like to look at and process money.
Computers and computer communication systems are the model on which to structure our money system. Money is virtual, fiat money. Brought into virtual reality when a unit chunk of it is encapsulated and uniquely identified. Defined as money when a uniquely identified owner is assigned to it. A money transaction change in ownership is accomplished by internet communication packets. Each packet encapsulates a message of what to do with each serialized digital dollar specified in the packet payload.
How to build a new money system? Look at the way we created what computers do and how they communicate. They dis-aggregate to the lowest level. Then they build up that level of dis-aggregate to the level of whoever or whatever is the view of choice chosen by user of the system.
Money is information in a computer system packet network. That system is already built. All we have to do is apply this thing we call money to it.
Money is just numbers.
What money does is the application of the numbers to whatever we choose using it in a decision making process.
The application of money is a decision in a social media.
No comments:
Post a Comment