008 - Money
Money, bills, notes, dough, cash, funds, capital, the great exchanger of civilization. All the noise lately with national digital currencies is very interesting. My primary interest is that future generations will be able to study the human condition more thoroughly through an all encompassing ledger of material transactions. Property, finances, daily spending, large capital spending, taxes, healthcare spending, all monetary transactions will become “intelligent”. Intelligent in the sense that the time, date, sender, and receiver are all pieces of information that live on the currency itself. Yes of course there are contemporary privacy concerns. But in thousands of years there will be no discretion while future researchers analyze our society. Do we show any discretion while pouring over transcripts and even tombs from just a few millennia ago?
It seems the great “common mind” of society is open to the idea of widespread digital currency. Every government might enjoy the idea that every monetary transaction is part of a centralized digital blockchain currency. Dollars can be traced from sender to recipient and sender to recipient ad infinitum. Tax collection I assume would be their primary interest. When a government issues a digital currency the transaction ledger may or may not be public, but the government would certainly know the identity of the person using a receiver wallet and sender wallet address. Of course there would remain black market blockchains to avoid such public transactions.
Money isn’t everything and along with that there are some really cool use cases for “intelligent” digital currency. For example, a batch of apples is sold at market and someone gets sick. The doctor determines the illness came from the apples. A notification could be sent to all people that purchased apples from that batch, the apples themselves can be traced back to each vendor and the spread of the illness could be curtailed.
Another use case for digital currency is the return of rightful property. Think of a time not so long ago in which a conquering army invaded a country and took possession of all the goods in that country. Perhaps after the war subsides and the conquering army leaves, the valuable goods that are left could be returned to their rightful owners. A record of that ownership, or at least of wealth at the time of invasion could be confirmed via the blockchain. In fact, a complete digital currency might help bring an end to invasive wars altogether. Why invade if the money is not even really there?
Regardless of all the contemporary dilemmas or solutions that a digital currency provokes, in just a hundred years our world will be exchanging goods via a blockchain currency almost exclusively. I am not worried about it and I should think that while the masses will adopt digital currency you and I will still be able to trade apples for fish, work for food, service for housing, and all the other things that brought us from caves to skyscrapers.
The currency depicted in this NFT is not any statement on any country. This bill was simply common and available, and that is why it was used. This NFT, nor this commentary, does not imply any commentary on current political climates outside of the interest in digital blockchain currency. It is this artist’s opinion that future scholars will find the information in the ledger to be a wealth of great understanding of the human condition, this artwork seeks only to shed light on that idea. Noteworthy that this week El Salvador became the first sovereign nation to accept Bitcoin as legal tender.
The burning stick represents outside influence that passes across the Bitcoin symbol and note. The note burns while the Bitcoin symbol remains unscathed. The intentional skipping in the animation represent either a broken, paused, or stunted process.
View the NFT below and purchase here. This NFT is 101/101 and represents a large but accessible amount. The hope is that this NFT’s ledger of transfer can be studied throughout time so that we all may have a better understanding of ourselves.
