Paper Money
Paper money seems to be antiquated at this point. Will money go completely digital at some point?
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Answers ( 1 )
So, I learned something yesterday. I was watching a talk with author Ada Palmer and she talked about how in Renaissance Italy, no one was minting new small coins. All people had were gold coins and no one could make change, because there were too few small coins. So vendors issued lines of credit and people would pay those at the end of the year with gold.
You might guess that eventually inflation would turn that to gold being worth less...but no. You might also guess that the vendors might trade credit as money...and maybe that happened in some cases if a vendor needed to pay someone, but what actually happened was that Florence eventually started to mint smaller coins, backed by the State's wealth.
It's possible that one day (soon) most business will be transacted digitally. Honestly, easily 99% of my incoming and outgoing money is not-real already at this point. But, when I go down to the sandwich place and she has had to stop accepting credit cards, because the cost of processeing them is more than she makes taking them, I take cash.
Legitimately small business will always need small amounts of cash and so will illegitimate business. For the rest, we'll all move numbers around in a computer system.