Money in an advanced civilization - Farsight Forums

Original post by @Tazz can be found here:

➡️ https://www.farsightprime.com/forums/general/77504-incase-any-has-not-heard-yet#post-454000

Quote: "If I were to guess: money is a commodity that makes trade or negotiation practical. It should be very low in depreciation or change, easy to transport, easy to verify its quality and quantity. Non-toxic metals, or metals of low toxicity, are very practical for these criteria. They are the ideal negotiable instruments."

They are not, because: Who owns the mine? People of Earth are not able to own a mine without slavery. But there's also practical reasons. First, what's the correct definition of money?

Definition: Money is a placeholder for life energy.

Example: If you build a house, you need to apply a certain amount of energy to do so. The life energy of the participating workers is converted into other forms, like electrical energy for the power tools, for instance. At the end, it's all kinetic energy, because you want to move bricks and drill holes.

This movement is the actual cost, because you need bodies to move stuff, and bodies need energy to function. The workers need to eat, the robots must be charged, etc. And if you have a cool zero-point energy source and anti-gravity tools, you need to build or buy them first.

So, money is the middle ground where all the participants of a project meet. The worker gets money so he can buy food, the robot gets money so it can charge itself or buy its robot body, and the supplier gets money so he can supply. It's that simple.

This means that money must be easily transferable. For example, if you use metals, the AI architect that needs to pay rent for the server it's running on can't carry the coins. This problem can only be solved if you limit the participants to people who can, but this will become a competitive disadvantage over time.

Bitcoin was the first digital money that tried to be scarce in order to maintain value and was successful doing so. But artificial scarcity is not stable. This also applies to metals, because at a certain point, there will be no scarcity anymore.

The only reasonable way to make money valuable is to bind it to a self-sovereign identity, and the identity must be bound to the body. The core principle must be that the ISBE owns the body it's using, so it can be free. That way, the circulating money can be bound to the count of bodies in use, which is the count of "active players", so to speak.

Money gets created only if the count of bodies in use increases. Money also must be destroyed, or hold back, if the count of bodies in use decreases. If this mechanism works in a reliable way, all participants can "count on" the value of the money.