From: Russell Wallace (russell.wallace@gmail.com)
Date: Sun Jan 07 2007 - 17:18:24 MST
A good currency needs to be storable, transportable, canonical and
verifiable. Energy, information and computation fail all these requirements.
If you postulate a world where most things made of atoms can be produced
easily, a rare element is a good candidate for a currency basis, being
plausibly still more expensive than its value to synthesize. To avoid
hauling samples of said element around on a daily basis, likely you'd want
to use some sort of tokens rather than the physical element for most
transactions. At this point you can either keep the element as backing for
the tokens, or just regard the tokens as valuable in themselves.
In other words, the way currencies actually developed isn't just an accident
of history :)
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