Prosperity Based Monetary Systems
For thousands of years humans have been consistently evolving the idea we call money, money is basically anything, be it an object or an idea, that is generally accepted as payment for goods and services and repayments of debts. It's a medium of exchange, a means with which to transfer value, something that can be used to store value, the definitions go on and on. To me, when you think about money, you realize, at its base level, it is simply an energy transference mechanism. It's a medium through which we can take perceived value and transfer it to one another.
The idea of money touches, influences, and motivates real world decisions that are made everyday by the vast majority of the people on planet earth. When business leaders make decisions that impact thousands of employees and tens of thousands of customers, they have to consider the financial ramifications of their decisions. Politicians doing their part to run governments must consider how much their proposed programs will cost, or how much a handshake deal will net them in cases of corruption. A single mother may have to decide between a job she really wants and a job that is less than ideal but has better pay in order to ensure the financial well being of her family. If we had no money in the system there would surely be a myriad of situations where people's motivational mechanism would lead them to make a more altruistic choice.
Money like any other technology is a double edged sword, it can be used as both a positive representation of our naturally abundant selves and as a negative representation of our choices to believe in the ideas related to limitations and lack. The world has limited resources right? Well if you believe so then the answer is yes, for you. My perspective is that human creativity, which comes from consciousness itself, is a huge driver of what the word resources even means! Clearly it would be tough to support a population of 7.125 Billion (2013) with the resources of 200 AD, but now we have different “resources” called engines which drive a plethora of machinery used to deliver foods to the masses with stunning precision and haste. We have used our most powerful resource, creativity, to create more resources and there are no limits to how far we can take these ideas!
Imagine if you took someone from 200 AD and pulled them into our time, given his belief structures, he would potentially think we were some sort of god like beings who had all these magical devices. Now picture another civilization maybe a type 3 civilization on the Kardashev Scale, can you imagine what they would be capable of? It might just be so mind blowing if you met them you would think you had to be dreaming! I wonder what they would think of the money system we use to trade energy between one another in an abundant reality?
Currently almost every money system on planet earth is a debt based system, what do you mean by that Kierre? Thank you, that's a great question I’ll tackle that now! Debt Based Monetary Systems are simply any system in which every new money unit created is created AS DEBT. This means when banks make a loan in our fractional reserve system they don’t have the actual money in the bank, instead they create new money and loan it, and that new money has both principal and interest associated with the repayment of it. This ensures there will always be more debt in the system than what I will loosely term “equity” for this paper. This “equity” is comprised of all the money and assets on the planet that are now debt free, even though most of the money that was used to buy them at one time was actually a debt owed to a bank.
In Debt Based Monetary Systems the interest rate mechanism draws large sums of money to financial institutions, they take a risk, create new money and loan it out then everyone plays a game of musical chairs and there are winners and losers and whoever ends up with some of the actual equity wins! This game plays itself out in many ways but the bank almost always has the upper hand because if you don’t pay your debts your collateral is seized. The only time the banks do not win en masse is in the case of a systemic meltdown like we had in 2007-2009, in this case they actually lost and lost big-time. They lost big-time so bad in fact that they won, our always faithful politicians and leaders worked a deal to give the banks what essentially was jubilee in disguise as a loan. Unfortunately virtually zero of this jubilee ever saw its way into the relief of the average person's debts. Sure you could argue that it helped revive the whole economy and that helped the masses, but I think we all know thats a pretty weak argument when you consider all the other potential possible solutions.
The challenge with Debt Based Monetary Systems is simple it's the fact that new money is created AS DEBT. In a Prosperity Based Monetary System new money is created AS EQUITY. In Debt Based Monetary Systems there will always be more debt than equity, and the equity that is there will always be struggling to make all the debt interest payments because the system can never be resolved. In other words there is never enough money NOW to pay off all the debts and interest of NOW, however there is money in the future to pay off the debts of NOW, potentially.
Money is simply an idea, and it needs to be an idea that serves its purpose well. Currently we are in a Debt Based Monetary system and it does do some things very well, we needed to get off the gold standard because we simply outgrew it. We needed more units of money to represent the fact that we were exchanging more and more energy with each other over time, and the gold standard was very limiting in that regard. The money supply needs to grow with the needs of the system it serves, if you have 10,000 people and we decide that each person needs roughly $50,000 worth of money to make the system work then the money supply needs to be $500,000,000. Multiply those numbers by 7.125 Billion and you get a very big number, the point is simply that there is some amount of money that the system needs to run efficiently given certain price points.
The forces of inflation and deflation need to be roughly balanced; if the money supply is low you need some inflation, if the money supply is high you need some deflation. Let's take that same system that had 10,000 people and $500,000,000 and lets say it was very strict and rigid. In this system they decided that no new money would ever be created so that the value of the money would stay high and there would be no inflation. This rigidity would eventually lead to breakdown as the forces of deflation would grow very strong as the population grew to say 1 Billion over time, now each person would only have .50 cents each to use, clearly this system would break down long before 1 Billion people came around but an extreme example does a good job of explaining the point. Create too much money however and you will find yourself in a hyperinflation like Zimbabwe or the Weimar Republic and we all know how well those turned out. So how can we take these ideas and put them to work in today's world and do it without the need to create money AS DEBT?
The good news is we are already creating these systems today with the use of blockchain technology. Bitcoin is the undisputed heavyweight champion of crypto currencies when you look at it from the perspective of its market cap and how much value is traded on the system daily. However the limited supply could lead to deflationary problems if the miners can't agree on how to fix that part of the system. There are some other systems in the Alt Coin realm that are actually pushing the boundaries of the technology in new and innovative ways and one example I know about is NEXUS.
In the NEXUS not only do miners receive rewards for mining, also everyday regular users receive interest for their computing time and being connected to the network. This is a real world example of a Prosperity Based Monetary System, this system will grow the money supply naturally over time and the new money that's created simply goes into everyone's wallet as interest payments! Now that's the kind of interest payment I can really stand behind! This is a really great system because it rewards everyone based on their dedication to the network and their investment in the coin. This new money is not associated with any debt, it just comes into creation because your computing resources are helping to make the network stronger and more secure therefore you get the reward. There are many other examples of these types of systems being created in the Alt Coin space; of course Steemit is another very cool Alt Coin system but I think everyone here already knows that!
Can you imagine the Federal Reserve printing money and putting it into your bank account instead of giving that power only to a handful of banks? How would that change the world? I’m guessing we would eventually solve all our “Debt Problems” because the equity would start to outweigh the debt. I’m guessing the wealth gap would start to improve slightly and more and more over time. I’m also guessing the Federal Reserve is not going to start doing this anytime soon which is why I am doing my homework and starting to invest in Bitcoin and some of the more promising Alt Coins.
If more and more people continue to work with Bitcoin and the best Alt Coins we can shift ourselves to more prosperous economic paradigms that give us more freedom and less restrictions! We can choose to move ourselves from Debt Based Monetary Systems to Prosperity Based Monetary Systems. There is no need for a revolution, there is no need to harm anyone or anything to do so, we simply need to take some of our focus off the current paradigms and put that focus and energy into new paradigms of abundance. No petitioning the inept government, no million man marches, just a quick transfer of money into Bitcoin or an Alt Coin and we are on the way! Oh, and yes if you help explain these concepts to others by say spreading this article or others like it that helps as well! All the current banking institutions and central banks took us this far, now we are going to show the world that there is another way it can be! Or at least I am anyways, who’s with me?
Kierre Reeg
Kierre Reeg is the CEO of TYME www.tymestyle.com, and before starting the company with his family he spent 8 years as a Senior Equity Trader at Unicom Capital a Denver/NYC based Hedge Fund
I would never go home if my workstation looked like that
NEXUS baby! I am 100% on board with you!
That quote is powerful!
Thanks for the comment! ;)
Great Post Kierre!
Great article!
Excellent explanation of where we are going and why it is important and why the current system is unsustainable. I agree that with Nexus we are aiming to take things in that direction and we are off to a pretty good start :)
Good write up.
The system is broken, but sadly sheeple will not see this until it falls flat.
We should see a problem and fix it before it gets bad.
But we as people are reactive. Not preventative.
Its happening with everythig we do...
I see what you are saying, and I would challenge you to think of how many people are actually thinking about it, pretty much everyone who is in some way involved in bitcoin or alt coins is taking action, so if that continues to spread, which you could see by the growth in market caps over time, you can know that people are taking notice! So focus on that and spread the word, then maybe we will all do a few shovels and a mountain will be moved all the sudden... https://coinmarketcap.com/
Wait, I recognize the building of the balcony you're on in that picture - Optima Camelview! I work in the building right next that. We should connect. I'm very interested in Nexus and have been trading Bitcoin since 2012, and Ethereum since 2016. Great article btw!
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