Money – The Ultimate Database Entry

Barter was a coincidence of wants.
Money evolved out of a need for a trusted token of value that allowed me to buy what you’re selling, even if I don’t have goods that you desire to pay you in compensation. When salt was scarce, it did the job. Shells were valuable tokens for trade too, until someone found their way to the coast. Glass beads were fine so long as they remained difficult to produce. Gold worked because it is rare and embodies proof that hard work has been invested to acquire it; but it’s cumbersome and dangerous to carry, hard to prove its purity, and not easy to reduce to small denominations. Paper evolved out receipts for gold held in vaults… until governments learned the trick that they could, “by fiat” declare un-backed money to be valuable.

95% of money today is database entries. Money is also a political tool–currencies ring-fenced into political silos so that Swiss Francs are useless a few hundred metres away at a shop in neighbouring Italy. But this is the internet age. Borderless
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Let’s look at a similar issue to borders and currency: Swiss postage stamps can’t move letters out of Italy–but Italian internet has no problem conveying a Swiss vacationer’s emails to anywhere else in the world. So, shouldn’t our money be more like email? Instant? Free of national boundaries? Cheap to convey?
It depends on the currency you choose and who owns the network that money moves through. The money we’re familiar with is very similar to the old post offices and their national stamps. Slow. Labour intensive. Expensive. It is government money, constrained into political silos. It runs on a banking system as old and creaking as the postal networks.Computer money is now upon us too–owned by nobody, running on infrastructure available to everybody. This money–Bitcoin and Crypto–is very like email–running on a single global distributed infrastructure.

Banks aren’t crazy about it. Should we shed a tear? Post offices weren’t wild about email either. Would you prefer we made them happy and returned to stamps and envelopes? Well, once you’ve got a taste of Crypto you won’t find traditional banking all that appealing either. Once you’ve transacted on the Bitcoin rails, nobody will have to explain, “but where is the value?” You’ll understand the value of high speed, low cost, and instant settlement. There’ll be no going back for you.
When you boil it down, every fraction of Bitcoin you acquire is a piece of the network you own–a network engineered to be staggeringly valuable.

​We can all get so wrapped up in the price speculation, that we forget about utility and value. When you own a token, you own piece of that project’s success. CLICK HERE to see is what Bitcoin rails with a layer 2 Lightning wallet can achieve — shifting money at light speed from person to person regardless of where in the world they are. Each of these transactions is final settlement which means, unlike a credit card or EFT transaction where the value transferred must still be reconciled days later, this is the total transaction and transfer of value: