Creeva’s World 2.0

Image from here

A lit­tle over ten years ago, before debit cards became ubiq­ui­tous and peo­ple cared more about hav­ing actual bits of paper for the mon­e­tary worth, I had a dis­cus­sion with a friend about how the world would  even­tu­ally move to a cash­less soci­ety.   I argued over the cost and extent of such a ven­ture going for­ward.   He did have one good point in his argu­ment — anonymity.

He believed due to cor­rup­tion (or any­thing else you wish to argue for) that there would always be cash money to allow for cit­i­zens to have an anony­mous usage of money in soci­ety.   I had sev­eral more argu­ments going against this back then, but I couldn’t truly get around the anonymity fac­tor, espe­cially with small unmarked bills.  I don’t believe the anonymity fac­tor is going to last too much longer though.

Enter in RFID dust, this effec­tively will destroy anonymity in a cash based soci­ety.   The tech­nol­ogy was devel­oped as an anti-counterfeiting method.   With this knowl­edge in hand we can make some assump­tions.  The first is that the dust can be used to ver­ify the authen­tic­ity of the bills.   The sec­ond, when it is truly embed­ded in the bills and not sprin­kled into batches of money — that the RFID will con­tain a ser­ial that will match the ser­ial num­ber on the bill itself.

If the dol­lar can “bea­con” the ser­ial num­ber, then how does it become anony­mous.   In the­ory before you use any paper money you could microwave it, but even­tu­ally that will no longer work either.  The next argu­ment would be that only the gov­ern­ment has the read­ers — this would be a “for how long argu­ment”.   Think of the theft and track­ing of the flow of money analy­sis that could be gained solely on a research per­spec­tive.  I can see in 20–30 years as the tech­nol­ogy becomes cheaper and cen­tral­ized data­bases are more avail­able — that this type of track­ing could be the norm.

I’ve writ­ten about soft­ware cur­rently that can track the flow of money, there is no rea­son we wouldn’t be able to see real time track­ing of every sin­gle penny in cir­cu­la­tion by uti­liz­ing this tech­nol­ogy.   The only thing stop­ping it right now is cost, which will drop.