Top 10 Inventions in Money Technology During the 1900's

scuggums writes "The DaVinci Institute has put together an interesting historic piece to help put the world of money technology into perspective. While I'm glad to see the ATM machine made the list, I had no idea it was invented back in 1939. Other items on the list are barcodes, spreadsheets, and RSA encryption. This looks to be one of the research pieces the Institute's doing for their upcoming Future of Money Summit in October."

Comments

Re:Historic inventions are nice

[moitz]

the government can destroy money that belongs to suspected criminals and therby prevent crime before it takes place.

Yeah, screw that whole "innocent until proven guilty" thing. Where'd that Constitution thingy go anyhow?

-moitz-

Ancient Greek Banking

[handy_vandal]

The first international banking system was establish ed by the Knights Templar during the crusades. ... I just think it's kind of interesting that banking has its roots in a militant order.

International banking goes back to Ancient Greece. The various city-states amounted, in their day, to the equivalent of today's nation-states. They carried on bank-supported trade with each other, and with more distant states such as Egypt.

Your point about banking having its roots in a militant order is well made. Indeed, governments have always reserved for themselves two things: armies and currency.

Wish we could get rid of the FED

[argoff]

The title says it all. The EURO too while were at it. IMHO, government has no business being in the money business other than punishing people who act fradulently, and holding dishonest people accountable. I'm not saying we should have a gold standard, but something whose value can't be manipulated by government policy. (Yeah, I know the FED technically isn't part of the US govt - but give me a break)

Re:Plastic money

[Snoopy77]

Modded funny?

The only thing funny is that the USians don't know what we mean. While you guys have pulling out soggy wads of green from your washing machines here in Australia we've been successfully laundering our plastic notes since the 80's.

Re:Complete Bull

[Raul654]

Let's put it another way. Consider the dollar and the Yen. Let's say both are backed by gold. Each dollar is backed up by one ounce of gold in the US federal reserve, while each yen is backed up by two ounces provided by the BOJ. You have now fixed the relationship of the dollar to the yen at 2 dollars/yen. So yes, the gold standard does in fact fix relationships. If everyone uses gold, then they all flucauate equally, so changes in the value of gold do not impact trade relationships

But let's say the japanese economy tanks, and they their buying power is really only 1 dollar/yen. People who have yen will trade them in (at the nominal rate of 2 dollars/yen) to get 2 dollars, and have thus doubled their real buying power. The BOJ then has to start buying yen with dollars (if they have them) or gold in order to equalize the value. But what happens if they run out of both? That was the trouble under the old system.

That system fell apart, and (even though some new ones were suggested) no replacement was ever implimented. The "chaos" that ensued was basically the best system possible.