Before the existence of money, people would have to barter to obtain the goods or services they desired. I have a cow and you have wood. If you wanted a cow and were willing to exchange your wood for it, we could have a deal (If I wanted wood in exchange for my cow, of course). If I wanted something other than wood in exchange for my cow, you would now have to be willing to find someone that has what I want and be willing to exchange your wood for that good so that you could eventually strike a deal with me. We can see how this can be exhausting and very inefficient.
Everybody loves gold. It's shiny, it's useful in electronics and most importantly, everybody wants it. If you know that the price of one ounce of gold today is $2,708.00, you can theoretically, exchange your gold pellets or bars for whatever it is you want. Of course, this means you and your gold have to physically be there to do the exchange. Not easy to do an international transaction, is it?
It also needs to be kept safe, which is another problem. If you keep your gold coins under your mattress or buried underground, somebody could come take it from you.
You can opt to hand it over to a custodian to hold it for you for a fee, in which case, you risk them seizing it.
Greenbacks
We'll skip the paper money part. You can Google it if you need to. I don't want to get into all the details here, the point I want to make in this section is about fiat money, specifically the US Dollar and how it became the world reserve currency. All banks accept it and unlike gold, it can be sent across borders digitally, meaning you can pay a fee to use the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecom. (SWIFT) to "wire" money across banks and financial institutions until it reaches your financial institution, the entity that knows exactly how much you hold, how much you spend, and has all your information including name, adress, phone number, identification, passport, blood type, and a long etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.
Not to mention, they could seize your funds at any given moment for a number of reasons.
With the birth of cryptocurrency, we can send money peer-to-peer with no central party overseeing or controlling our transactions. But which blockchain will provide the infrastructure to be the world's new currency?
Bitcoin
Bitcoin of course! It's the most widely accepted, mathematically proven, permissionless and limited form of money to have ever been created... except... It can be very slow. No merchant wants to wait 10 to 120 minutes for a transaction to be confirmed.
Lightning
A 2nd layer solution that makes transaction super fast and very cheap, but has also faced criticism for having the tendency for large, institutional nodes to provide the majority of payment channels, thus creating dependency.
Dash
A coin that has over 160,000 that accept it, over 200 exchanges that has trading pairs with it and super fast transaction speed. Super promising! except, none of the merchants in my neighborhood (Barrio Bitcoin) accept it. I could try to convince merchants in my area to accept it or...
Like I've said in previous posts...
The future of blockchain is multichain. Not one chain to rule them all
Interoperability - The future of blockchain is multichain
I might be completely wrong, but I think collaboration is the name of the game. Not only that, it needs to be super easy, unnoticeable even, for both client and merchant.
HBD stablecoin in collaboration with other networks.
Right now, this to me seems like an example of what the future of money could be like. You don't need to convince merchants to accept yet another form of payment. If they accept Bitcoin over Lightning you can just pull out your Keychain App (@keychain), which provides easy access to V4V (@v4v), which allows you to spend HBD to pay a Lightning Invoice. The merchant gets a confirmation in a couple of seconds, you get a confirmation in a couple of seconds and everybody goes about their day like nothing.
You might have seen some of my videos doing this (I've made quite a few):
Now that users of Hive blockchain, including members of INLEO have been talking about collaboration, how long will it be before Keychain, V4V or another dapp develops a Dash (@dashpay) to Lightning solution? How about other chains?
Merchants don't care what is going on in the backend as long as the client scans the QR and they get a green checkmark.
They don't care or even need to know if you earned it be creating value for others in written, audio or video form.
This is what I believe the the future of value exchange looks like.
From a merchant perspective I guess it's a little bit different
Let the client do a thing, get a green checkmark
The idea is the same from both points of view though: make it stupid simple without the need to understand what's going on in the backend :)
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