Oh look! Another bubble
(twitter.com)
You're viewing a single comment thread. View all comments, or full comment thread.
Comments (49)
sorted by:
I think sci-fi has the right of it, the next form of currency in the near future might be some form of energy credit system.
What, like some form of fuel currency? A Petrodollar if you will?
Yes, except modernized for the fuel that is more universally relevent in a world with gigawatt server farms and most electricity isn't generated by petrol generators.
There isn't a fuel that's much more relevant than oil. It's basically the lifeblood of logistics. You don't need massive server farms to have a reasonably modern nation, you do need motorized transport though and oil is the best fuel for small motor vehicles as well as what almost all of them have been built for in in the last century.
Short of an entire global restructuring of logistical networks or massive advancements in alternative fuels oil just can't be beat in terms of importance due to it's versatility and utility for last leg shipping.
Like I said, I'm imagining future next iterations, it's not a right-now kind of proposal.
The logistics restructuring pressure is already there for electric and has slowly been chipping away at the infrastructure wherever it is remotely practical, and if things carry on in the current trend then you will need massive local server farms to remain a competitive modern nation sooner or later. At some point in the foreseeable future there's a good chance that electrical power is an even more universal necessity than gas.
That's not right, because it implies energy is ultimately the only thing that has value, but there's also land, craftmanship and others. Making money solely about energy is like making money about gold: it's a step back in the abstraction of value that money is.
Money's not supposed to represent everything of value, it's an just abstract representation of value.
It's just much more stable if it's tied to something that has almost universal nominal value to most people. Like you have 10 cows and need a car, but the car salesman is vegetarian. Rather than barter in circles every time we need something we can instead habitually trade our specialty goods for a certain value of a good with near universal demand, which energy fits pretty well because we all like to have lights on in our homes (Amish not withstanding) and electricity is a near universal cost of modern manufacturing. Money is just an extra step of abstraction from that, where instead of having to physically have the goods in question, you can just have a reasonably secure promise that the money can be always traded for said goods.
I understand the definition of money. The problem is tying it up to anything as specific as energy. It's not encompassing enough.
I just don't see how you can tie it to multiple things unless they're inherently linked supply-wise, otherwise the value would get unstable if supply of one thing independently went up whilst the other went down.
It either has to be tied to one specific thing (gold/oil/etc.) or it becomes completely abstract again.