It's so uncanny how accurate this describes Bitcoin before Bitcoin was invented. Lucky for us, that future is today, and there's no other way to win the game, but to play. Buy Bitcoin!
I can't (easily) display images anymore, besides something like this deserves a proper quotation, which falls under fair use:
Paper money is a distinctly industrial product. It would have been impractical before the printing press to duplicate receipts or certificates that became paper currency. Certainly, monks in the scriptoria would not have spent their time well drawing fifty-pound notes. Paper money also contributed significantly to the power of the state, not only by generating profits from depreciating the currency, but by giving the state leverage over who could accumulate wealth. As Abu-Lughod put it, "when paper money backed by the state become the approved currency, the chances for amassing capital in opposition to or independent of the whole machinery became difficult."
Cybercash
Now the advent of the Information Age implies another revolution in the character of money. As cybercommerce begins, it will lead inevitably to cybermoney. This new form of money will reset the odds, reducing the capacity of the world's nation-states to determine who becomes a Sovereign Individual. A crucial part of this change will come about because of the effect of information technology in liberating the holders of wealth from expropriation through inflation. Soon, you will pay for almost any transaction over the Net or World Wide Web at the same time you place it, using cybercash.
This new digital form of money is destined to play a pivotal role in cybercommerce. It will consist of encrypted sequences of multihundred-digit prime numbers. Unique, anonymous, and verifiable, this money will accommodate the largest transactions. It will also be divisible into the tiniest fraction of value. It will be tradable at a keystroke in a multitrillion-dollar wholesale market without borders.
Dialing Without Dollars
Inevitably, this new cybermoney will be denationalized. When Sovereign Individuals can deal across borders in a realm with no physical reality, they will no longer need to tolerate the long-rehearsed practice of government degrading the value of money through inflation...
Yes the last part was getting good, too bad the picture is incomplete. The current generation is probably unfamiliar with the term "dialing", which used to be synonymous of internet access in the late 90ies.
Incidentally in the 90ies i did my first international purchase from an internet shop (some bookstore from the university of California) using someone else's credit card (with permission, of course). Back then there were no security codes...
Around those days also came the famous Paypal application, which allowed sending money via email from Palm devices (current generation won't know about those PDA thingies that predate smartphones either). Couple of decades later and one (of two) guys that came up with that is sending electric cars to Mars lol.
