Money as a Bridge

I wrote the following in response to this.

Building Bridges to Cash.  Excellent idea but maybe it takes a whole new way of looking at what we denote as money that is profoundly and fundamentally different. Looking at it differently:  Cash itself is the bridge not something that the bridge gets to.

Money used to move, long ago, from hand to hand.  Now it moves primarily from account to account.  From the name of one owner/possessor to another.  The amount transferred is variable.  The account number of the possessor is fixed.  A single owner or financial entity may have many accounts or pots of money.

Money flows from pot to pot. It originally moved physically because it was a physical medium with physical constraints. Now it moves conceptually, digitally, but our thinking about money is still constrained to thinking about it in terms of physical movement in the process of what money does; paying and receiving.

What if the digital record of money was the fixed primary central record of a serialized unit of denominated money that never changed.  Only the name of the possessor of that unit changed as a function of payment/receipt transactions. The number of money units with the same owner's name associated to them would be variable.

This is not a new concept.  It applies to the gold stored by the Federal Reserve in New York.  Some gold stored there is owned by other countries.  When it transfers to a different owner country only the name on the gold changes.  Venezuela recently decided not to play this game and shipped all of their gold home.  They decided it was safer there than here.

This is the big change:  Digital, serialized, denominated units of money do not flow.  They are static records.  The record entity, a uniquely serialized dollar, once created, exists forever.  It never goes anywhere.  All that record needs to "know" is the current owner (financial entity account number) and an accounting history reference link to the last owner and date of change.  A network and access device connects us to our money. 

It is a completely different concept of what money "does" as far as movement.  It is like a bridge.  Not a bridge to nowhere but a bridge that goes nowhere.  A bridge that remains fixed in position in order to facilitate conveyance of value as the medium of exchange to "carry" an associated thing of value from an owner on one side to a new owner on the other side.

Don't build a bridge to cash.  Make digital cash the bridge.

It is a different way of looking at it just like not raising the bridge but lowering the water.  Which "thing" is fixed and which is variable makes all the difference.

This is a rule of information as well as a rule of the universe:  The building block of a physical or conceptual structure is what a thing is, not what it does.  Once that is established then its function, what it does, can be just about anything.  It works for energy.  It works for social structure.  The fundamental thing of our political structure is our unique vote.  We established the fixed thing.  We control what it does. (Unless the vote is "fixed" then someone else controls what it does).

Once upon a time money was what money did.  The physical existence of money was locked and bound to what it did.  There was a fork in the road where what money is in terms of a physical thing (cash) separated from what it did.  The physical thing called money became conceptual (we still have a physical vestige).  We, as beings that (in the majority) focus primarily on what things do rather than what things are, continued to focus on what money does not what it is.  We still do.  We have lost sight and control of what money is and the fact that those that design and control what money is. A few have the power to determine to great extent what money is and therefore what it does.

Money should be this as a thing:  A perpetual, static, digital, uniquely serialized and denominated central record of unit value that relates to variable financial entity ownership.

That is what money should be as the building block of a monetary system. Real money.  Not a functional derivative of a balance sheet representation of debt.  If we establish the building block of what money is then money can do what money does.  What money does is economics.  Debt is one of the things that money does but in the current system that is also what money is.  That should not be what money is.  Currently money exists only as a representation of debt until the existence of that money is extinguished by debt repayment. It is a hell of a way to build a railroad when the tracks to get where you want to go are always coming into and going out of existence.  Good for the track business as long as you have all the tracks in the world or ability to create them at the push of a button.

Money should not flow, move, come and go or ever die.  A bridge does not move from one side to the other.  It sure helps us get where we are going. It is a big change to make to stop the movement of money and simply let everything we do with it move.  Look at it that way and a whole new system emerges.