No worries. Just to note, I'm definitely pro-technology.



The short version is that the average person's problem with money is not having enough of it. That's their primary concern. They don't really care whether their money is held by a central source or in a decentralised ledger, because they're too busy struggling to pay bills and worrying about the future. Not just the immediate future but whether they'll have enough to retire on, or even if they'll ever be able to retire. That's the point we're at right now.

I do not think people understand the impact the latest batch of smart technology is about to have. I mentioned the driver-less car above. I was a teenager in the 1980s and used to watch Knight Rider. The idea of a car that could talk and drive itself seemed like science-fiction, yet thirty years later it's about to become reality. I remember watching an episode of The Simpsons about self-driving trucks. That too is about to become a reality. Millions of people are going to lose their livelihoods. OK, we can say that more tech jobs will be created as a result, but nowhere near enough to replace the jobs lost. And people are different, aren't they? Not everyone has the aptitude to become a programmer or an engineer.

The problem as I see it is that technological development eliminates the need for human labour, yet we conceptualise money as a 'debt' and tell people it has to be 'earned' by human labour. What happens when our level of technological development reaches the point where entire sectors of the employment market are made redundant overnight? Will we become Luddites and fight for our right to perform tedious, mind-numbing jobs in order to put food in our belly and a roof over our head?

Bitcoin has made it self-evident that money is a technology. Unlike other technologies, money hasn't adapted to changing circumstances and human needs. What really interests me about Bitcoin is that, in effect, computers are making money. There's nothing particularly new about that (banks and stock markets have been doing it for ages) but Bitcoin demonstrates that, in theory, the process of money creation itself can be decentralised. For me, the obvious question to ask is how far can we take that decentralisation? Personally, not only do I think we have to totally reconceptualise what money is, I think the logic of technological development is going to take us down that road whether we like it or not. I mean, if people don't earn then they don't eat, so what happens when they can't earn because jobs are no longer available?

HS