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The Future of Money
Snuggums writes "Apparently some major forces at play in the tech money world. People like Vint Cerf, Tim O'Reilly, Andre Durand, and Cory Doctorow are teaming up with Tom Frey and the futurist think tank, DaVinci Institute, to dive into the forces at play with a Future of Money Summit later this year. They've even tapped a Nobel Prize winner and Visa founder, Dee Hock. They're hoping to answer questions like; what kind of money you'll be putting into vending machines 25 years from now; when will cash disappear; when will our current banking system become obsolete; and who gets to own money in the future?"
at my apt. complex they installed new washer and dryers w/cash card readers. I find it slightly inconvienient b/c I have to goto the main building to fill the card w/cash (but it does take credit card and debit). Other than that, it is slightly easier b/c I don't have to store $15 in quarters for laundry day.
I stopped using cash about 3 years ago. I keep two checking accounts and one savings account. I have a seperate check card for the second checking account and I transfer money to it for purchases (even at the grocery store just incase someone hits and extra zero and empties my account).
Once Wendy's and drug dealers take CC's I am set.
Why does it still take 5 damned days for a transaction to "clear" when I move money from one account to another? Has anyone actually ever challenged any banks/building societies to justify this delay?
Code, Hardware, stuff like that.
what kind of money you'll be putting into vending machines 25 years from now
I already rely on cash only as much as absolutely necessary. With a debit card, I can pay for any credit card transaction directly out of my checking account, and more and more places are accepting credit cards every day. Hell, in bigger cities, you can even use a credit card in places like a Jack in the Box drive thru. In 25 years it'll be even more pervasive.
Some places now are even supporting debit cards directly and require me to enter my PIN... all the better, that extra layer of security is a little comforting. If my card is ever stolen though, I'm limited in liability to $50, thanks to credit card laws that apply even though it technically isn't a credit card, and I keep a little nest egg tucked away in an unrelated account to tide me over while the bank tracks down and fixes any unauthorized use of my main account.
Sure, it's not exactly a model of privacy since every purchase I make is logged on my account, but I consider the security of my money more important as a real issue than the nebulous fear that someone, somewhere is going to exploit the fact that I like buying cheeseburgers for lunch.
NO CARRIER
I agree. The society is not ready. Even right here in NYC, just go check out chinatown. They don't accept credit cards, much less check and debit. If you work here you get paid in cash in person. If you ask a store owner why they don't accept credit, they'll say that they don't trust it.
E-money is the ultimate form of Fiat if you ask me. All fiat has a history of corruption and collapse (the american dollar and other world currencies are heading that way as well). Fiat money is the money of the statist, since it allows those in charge of the press to create as much money as they need, while dilluting what the rest of us hold.
The question isn't "what form will money be in", the question should be "what assets will back our money". I don't care if its in the form of rice crispies, as long as it is backed by an asset (gold, food, land, space rocks) and has real value.
To be 100% honest, I can't even remember the last time I was in a store that didn't take plastic.
In the Bay Area, I find that some of the smaller hole-in-the-wall resturants and several of the larger produce stores don't take plastic. The food at the resturants is good, and the ATM is nearby, so I keep going.
Some large places that don't take plastic: Zachary's Pizza in Oakland and Berkeley, Monterey Produce Market in Berkeley. Thousands of people go through each place every week, and the owner's attitude is "Plastic is a hassle, and 5% of purchases are fradulent, therefore I don't bother."
"Can of worms? The can is open... the worms are everywhere."
Here's a reference which says the rumor is true.
And I tend to believe Snopes.
"Can of worms? The can is open... the worms are everywhere."
I hope all of you /.ers see the consequences here. Firstly without cash the govt will know eveything you buy and when you buy it.
Also all of a sudden all of these banks and other get a peice of your money for the 'convience' of not using cash.. and then when it catches on they will charge you for the privilidge of using cash. If you recall, when ATMs first came out they were all free to use because it saved the banks money as oposed to have everyone seeing bank tellers. Then they started to charge you to use the bank tellers because it cost them more then if you used the ATM. Then they charge you to use the ATM as a convience fee.
So you are going to be charged a fee to replace your card that has an intentional limited life span, you will be charged to transfer funds to it, you will be charged an electronic transaction fee when you use it. Its like an infinite infusion of middlemen.
What you are referring to is the growth in the money supply through the Fed down to the fractional reserve banks. M3 money has grown by leaps and bounds in the Greenspan era. This and only this is the source of the stock market bubble.
Or, alternatively, when phone/telecommunications systems go down. Anyone who was in Manhattan on September 11th and the days immediately following will probably recall that many stores had either ceased accepting cards at all, or had set up special lines because only a few of their readers were working. This was due to the incredible call volumes that were jamming up the city's relatively limited numbers of long-distance circuits.
Fortunately, most of the ATMs were up and running (though a few had run out of cash, because so many people were using them where previously they'd just relied on their check/credit cards.)
I love my check card, but I'm pretty sure it won't be there for me on that occasion when I most desperately need it.
The existing banking system will continue ad infinitium because there's too much money to be made the way things are now. Noone would ever propose something different because they can already quantify the amount of money they make now. There would be too much risk in something different.
Gorkman
We here in New Zealand have had a great system that has been in use for many years now called EFTPOS. You can use you banks cash card ANYWHERE.
:)
Even some of the local flea market stalls have this available.
I hardly carry physical cash on me any more and I know a lot of other people out there are starting to do this.
Even the banks are supporting this by making new bank accounts with lower fees if you do everything electronically.
People visiting us from overseas love this system and find it hard going back
This is the future of money.
So in other countries, banks don't charge anything for issuing debit cards, maintain the databases, routing the funds, etc.? I find this a bit hard to believe.
i read one of the panelists books awhile back (actually after a reference on slashdot :), the future of money by bernard lietaer. his main point is that "money is an agreement," which under that definition simplies the commonly understood definition -- a unit of account, a store of value, a means of exchange. so the scarcity of money in a society is a scarcity of agreement (echoed in dostoevsky's dream of ridiculous man btw, "if only we all agreed, it could all be arranged at once.")
:) and that there'd be fewer financial and economic catastrophes if 'alternative' currencies were promoted and in some cases legalized to fill gaps not serviced by 'traditional' money. in the US, for example, i think the federal reserve's monetary policy 'levers' are increasingly blunt tools to regulate business cycles and the economic environment. having myriad interoperating systems of currencies could provide for a more stable and balanced system. one of the more interesting non-fiction books i've read in the past few years!
from there he talks about how to create monetary systems that foster more agreement, creating money on demand with no inflationary consequences, such as Local Exchange Trading Systems (LETS) and HOURS. he also talks about demurrage currencies (used after WWI in austria--the worgl experiment--with interesting speculation that if it had been allowed to succeed, WWII may never have occurred!) and commodity buffer stocks originally advocated by keynes following WWII at bretton woods as the basis for the international monetary system (gold with the US dollar as reference currency was chosen instead--the white plan--and i think it was nixon who took us off the gold standard to finance the vietnam war more easily).
anyway, his point is that fractional reserve fiat based currencies are good for some things, but not suited for others (kind of like operating systems
also btw, that same poster who dropped the lietaer book on me also had an interesting post on dee hock oh and, another cool take on money is keith hart's the memory bank. sorry to see he's not on the panel.