I grew up with an absence of technology in my life. For many the 1990s was the era of Nintendo, MTV, CDs, and AOL. I spent these years on a farm in eastern Washington, not watching secular TV or listen to non-religious music, driving a tractor and fixing old truck engines. What I took from this time was a strong work ethic and grit, and a love of technology. These two drives have guided me in my career and my education.
CS875 is a course that I imagine will help me immensely to narrow down and understand the topic of my dissertation better. This is the topic of the digitization of money.
There are many aspects of financial digitization that are in a mature state, while others are in their infancy or still theoretical. My first job out of college was at an "Internet Bank" which like FinTech today was often described as a fad or with limited potential. My goal through this blog is to explore what the digitation of money means, which will inevitably also include what is money?
Now, the goal of the coursework as I understand it is to focus on technology not even available yet. True Futurism. So I will not be focusing on things like Bitcoin or other Crypto because those exist and are relatively well established. Crypto is also not currency. Not in the real sense of the term, which is the institutional sense. Consumers using bitcoin as money is just a barter system, like gold. The justification of Bitcoin as currency leverages a store of value, like gold. This is the definition of an asset, not a currency. Not money. To be real money it needs to be leveraged by the global financial system via Derivatives ($350T) and the Eurodollar ($32T) market, all of which we will go into via this Blog.
One item I will go into, is Central bank Digital Currency (CBDC). While it is in theory something in development. That development is still very theoretical, with much of what is being done still running on legacy Central banking rails. CBDC is currently as close to reality in my opinion as flying cars or hoverboards. While we'll probably have CBDC before we have hoverboards, both still only really exist in pitchbooks and whitepapers.
The reason I chose to research the digitization of money, is because money is the denominator in which everything else is measured. It's how we value our earth and ourselves in our meritocracy, and it is outdated. Its outdated primarily because it has been ignored and kept in the shadows. Its assumed to be something that just works. It reminds me the the 2005 Graduation Speech given by David Foster Wallace to the Graduating class at Kenyon College (Krajeski, 2008):
"There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, “What the hell is water?”"
I think this a great metaphor for money, the think we always think about, but somehow never "think" about. However, it's not the wise old fish enlightening the younger fish, its the awoken younger fish enlightening the older oblivious fish.
References:
Krajeski, J. (2008). This is Water: David Foster Wallace. The New Yorker Magazine. https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/this-is-water
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