Digital currency was inevitable; crypto is merely its latest incarnation. Looking back over time, it’s immediately obvious that the long-term trend is towards the complete virtualization of currency.
- Gold & Silver (universal hard currency)
- Paper Currency (fiat currency)
- Checks / Money Orders / COD’s (paper representation of paper currency)
- Credit, Debit, PayPal & EBT (digital representation of paper currency)
- Cryptocurrency (digital representation of market value)
The drive for virtualization started with portability, because it’s cumbersome to carry around a pocket full of gold to go shopping. Paper started out as a representation of gold, later on it became valued simply by fiat. After that, checks & electronic transactions became representations for paper currency.
Why keep the paper currency? That’s where crypto has taken us. All currency, even gold, represents value — as long as the two parties in any business transaction can agree on the value of a currency, it doesn’t matter if it’s gold, paper, or electrons.
We’ve had completely electronic cash-exchange for decades now — that’s what your debit & credit cards are for. The paper bills stay put, or in the case of a bank loan, the paper…
